


Kamen Rider Utsura the Movie: 52 Assaults

by starofjustice



Series: Kamen Rider Utsura [1]
Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: Action 52, Action/Adventure, Bravoman - Freeform, Hercules - Freeform, Livin Large, Namco - Freeform, TMNT Ripoffs, Video & Computer Games, dragon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 14:30:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17869013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starofjustice/pseuds/starofjustice
Summary: It's chaos as the New GENM Riders find themselves taking on the broken code and mismatched monsters of one of the worst-made games of all time! Or...52 of the worst-made games of all time!





	1. Chapter 1

**Hey there! This happens around Chapter 16 of the main Kamen Rider Utsura story! If you’re already caught up, enjoy!**

 

            The day seemed unusually bright.

            Everyone seemed to be moving faster out on the street, smiling brighter, laughing louder.

            The loudest laughter was coming from downstairs as Kensei Hidenaga finished combing his hair and buttoning up his school uniform for the day. When he got down to the kitchen, his mother was practically dancing around the table as she laid out breakfast for them.

            “Something special happening?” he asked, smiling a little to see her so happy.

            “Like you don’t remember!” she chided him teasingly.

            “Of course I remember,” replied Kensei, who didn’t.

            “Tomorrow’s the anniversary of the day Yuuma-kun saved those people from that wizard monster!” she chirped.

            Kensei sat down at the table, suddenly not really feeling like he was in the room with anyone else. He didn’t remember the exact day that happened; honestly he’d kind of wanted to forget. The fact that his brother was dead—kind of—seemed like it should be enough, shouldn’t it?

            Silently he took the En En Chambara Gashat out and set it on the table next to his food. The game that made him a Kamen Rider. The one that Yuuma had managed to come back to bring him.

Because Yuuma couldn’t be there to use it himself.

            As he started eating, Kensei started thinking about his brother. Yuuma, the strong, brave, caring idol of the whole school.

            What kind of Kamen Rider would he be?

            One who probably would’ve taken care of all their problems already.

 

 

**Kamen Rider Utsura: 52 Assaults**

 

 

            A deafening burp that knocked Kensei back in his seat marked the final passing of his gigantic hamburger. He groaned, and wondered if he’d ever be able to stand up again, feeling like he’d swallowed a wrecking ball.

            “And 47 seconds to go! You made it!” the girl holding the stopwatch announced.

            The people at the next few tables clapped at Kensei’s triumph over the hubcap-sized hamburger. The girl who’d been timing him leaned down to pin a gold badge with the number 1 on it to his uniform jacket, and Kensei was surprised to find the energy to sit up and return her smile.

            “See if I ever let you talk me into anything again, Kiiko,” he said, smirking.

            “Quiet! The student isn’t allowed to contradict the master!” she retorted.

            “Oh, before you were ‘the trainer’, but now you’re ‘the master’, huh?” he laughed. “Guess they promoted you already?”

            She frowned. “Maybe you need to go back to being a 2nd Mate to learn why you shouldn’t make fun of the master,” Kiiko said and reached out for the badge she’d just given him. He reached out and caught her wrist.

            “Oh no you don’t,” he laughed again, but quietly as his digestion kicked in. “I earned that.”

            Kiiko pouted at him for a minute, then pulled back with her wrist and Kensei let go. “Mmmm, my shift’s over in a few minutes. You and me have things we need to do though,” she said.

            “Well, master, why don’t I go make sure my reflexes are still sharp?” Kensei asked and got up, heading for the pair of arcade cabinets at the back of the Big Bang Burger.

            The gaudy but faded marquee for the Tuna Diver machine still hung over a blank screen and a greasy piece of paper taped quickly to the front saying OUT OF ORDER. Instead Kensei stepped over to the other game, a battered and faded machine but one whose attract mode still showed a chicken bouncing off a narrow landing pad and exploding in a cloud of feathers as it hit the ground.

            A little uncertainly, Kensei slid a coin into the slot of Astro Chicken. The high score list disappeared and a screen telling him to get ready gave him a large fraction of a second to do so before Astro Chicken started dropping from a corner.

            He hit the button to make Astro Chicken start flapping his wings, and it seemed to _limp_ to the right toward the landing pad instead of fly, but shot straight up until Kensei hit the button again. Astro Chicken dropped straight down, limping slightly the direction Kensei wanted it to move until he hit the fly button making the chicken go up like a missile again.

            It might just have been the age and condition of the machine, but something made Kensei doubt that was why the chicken controlled like a car with five flat tires. Doubt that it was just a joke that the company that made it was named Scumsoft. Especially as the energy meter bottomed after 6.4 seconds of flight and Astro Chicken dropped to the ground exploded.

            “Could there be a worse game than this…?” Kensei mumbled. Another chicken fell onto the screen and after some furious maneuvering he got it almost to the edge of the landing pad. But again the furious bouncing up and down drained the energy meter just a little too soon and chicken number two went up in a blaze of feathers.

            He faintly remembered Kiiko saying something about wanting his name at the top of the high score list for this game. That when he managed that, his training would be over. No kidding.

            So he was a little surprised when the chicken bounced up and down less furiously than before he actually managed to land it in the middle of the screen. Astro Chicken tossed back his head and let out a BA-COCK! The heavy lady digging into her third Captain’s Burger sitting next to the games jumped in her seat, spilling her soda all over her lap.

            He’d barely had a second to realize he’d accomplished his goal than Kiiko seemed to un-melt out of the floor next to him. “What was that??” she asked.

            “I, uh, beat the level?” Kensei replied as he recovered from her surprising appearance, even though nothing about Kiiko was _ever_ restrained. Another chicken dropped from the top of the screen and Kensei started the stop-start flying technique he’d just used to land the one before it.

            Suddenly something buzzed against his side, and it felt like something was trying to tear its way out of his pocket. As Kensei lost control and Astro Chicken fell to his doom, he realized it was just his phone vibrating. He got it out, ignoring the mocking yellow GAME OVER sign on the screen.

            There was a text message from an unknown sender, but skimming it told him who sent it.

            “Servers hacked to leave message. Perpetrator has identified themselves and wants meeting with Riders, claims hack was requested to them by Kuroto Dan. Wants meeting at south platform of Tomobiki Station ASAP. Show Gashats to notify contact.”

            Kiiko leaned over his shoulder, resting her chin against it. Kensei shuddered for a second. “Kuroto Dan?” she asked. “He was the bad guy who made the old monsters, right? The Buggers?”

            “Bugsters, but yes,” Kensei answered.

            She stuck out her tongue and made a disgusted noise in her throat. “Even what I thought they were is a better name.”

            “…if they have a cool-sounding name or not really isn’t the point, Kiiko.”

            “Of course it is! How are the heroes supposed to seem cool if they fight enemies with dumb names? What’s impressive about beating a bad guy who sounds weak?”

            He half-chuckled, half-sighed. “Guess we know what we’re doing after your shift,” he said.

            “You have _way_ better things to do than look into stupid rumors about a bad guy they already beat.”

            “But heroes are always supposed to answer calls for help, right? If they just went straight through all the towns without helping anybody the game would be over in two hours, wouldn’t it?” he replied with a teasing smile.

            “Mmm,” she grunted.

 

XXX

 

            Kensei walked around the block as he tried to call the other Kamen Riders to make sure he didn’t fall asleep from the huge burger he’d let Kiiko talk him into eating for his training.

            When he turned a corner he suddenly stopped and stared at something he thought he saw in the sky between two buildings. What he assumed was a spaceship, looking just like a dark blue turnip with a pair of pole sticking out from the sides, crazhed in a giant block hanging in the air and disappeared in an explosion with blocky edges like in an old video game.

            Then he blinked and there was nothing there.

            “...This is Kasuga. Hello?...Hello?? Hidenaga, you better not just be calling to make some stupid prank!”

            “Uh, hi!” Kensei yanked his phone back up to his ear. “Did you get a text from GENM just now?”

            “Of course I did,” Yoshoku replied. “We gonna look into that now?”

            In the sky where he’d just seen the spaceship had exploded a series of words in dull pink letters: “STAR EVIL: Ready.” Then just like the ship it was gone again.

            “Hidenaga?...Hidenaga! I swear, if you’re playing around on purpose—"

            “Yoshoku, have you seen any weird video game stuff in real life lately?” Kensei asked.

            “All the time. We fight video game monsters together, remember?”

            “No, I mean…I guess you haven’t. Let’s meet at the station.”

            “On my way. Are you bringing Mishiranu?”

            Kensei scanned the skies again for a few seconds before he answered. “Yeah, just in case. I get the feeling something weird is going on.”

            “Like what?”

            “I don’t know yet,” Kensei answered.

 

XXX

 

            As he and Kiiko walked through the streets Kensei couldn’t shake a feeling that something really was wrong. The poisoned injury on his arm seemed to shake a little instead of just the usual painful itch.

            But soon it was more than just that. There seemed to be some kind of magnet pull on the back of his brain as he walked, like some power was building up nearby. As he looked over at Kiiko, she looked him in the eye and asked, “Do you feel that too?”

            He nodded. “I feel like, I don’t know, like something’s getting ready to happen. Something big. Something…bad.”

            As they got to the station platform Kensei took out his En En Chambara Gashat and started to twirl it on one finger like he’d been told, hoping that the person who’d hacked GENM would see it and come out to tell them what was going on.

            “Hey!” a high voice yelled out then, one voice rising over the noise of all the people chattering on the platform. No-one looked up from their phone or books, but suddenly a little girl shoved her way between a young couple, interrupting their kiss.

            She had on a blinding green blouse and a dazzling yellow skirt, paralleling the electrified pink color of her sneakers. It was all Kensei could do to look straight at her, let alone the Mighty logo on the heel of her shoes, or the bearded knight with his winged helmet and flowing white cloak from Taddle Legacy on her shirt.

            Although the girl herself would’ve been hard to miss all on her own. Just to start with she was a westerner, a pale girl with wavy brown hair and dark green eyes that bubbled with excitement. She ran at the two of them so fast Kiiko yipped and jumped backward, seemingly afraid the girl would knock her over.

            Instead the girl stopped and looked up at the two of them, grinning. “Is that the _real_ En En Chambara??” she exclaimed in wonder.

            Kensei smiled as Kiiko recovered. “Yeah, this is real one. The one that isn’t just a fun game, it’s also where Kamen Rider Utsura’s powers come from.”

            “Can I try it?” the girl gasped.

            With an overly loud sigh to get everyone’s attention Kiiko took a step forward. “It only works if your body’s been specially reformatted,” she explained, then gave the girl a sharp look. “Are _you_ the person who hacked into GENM?”

            The girl’s enthusiasm faded away and she rubbed the toe of her shoe against the ground. “…not exactly,” she admitted.

            “What does _that_ mean?” Kiiko asked.

            Kensei stepped forward and got down on one knee to face the girl on her own eye level, before Kiiko accidentally made things too awkward with her bluntness. “Let’s start over, okay? My name’s Kensei, this is Kiiko. What’s your name?”

            “Perri!” she answered, her face lighting up again.

            “Nice to meet you, Perri. Now, is it true you hacked GENM’s computers? You must’ve had a really important reason to do something like that.”

            Perri chewed her lip. “I did it because Kuro-san said you needed to know something bad was coming soon.”

            He reached out and patted her shoulder. “How do you know Kuroto Dan? And what did he say’s going to happen?”

            All of a sudden the buzzing on the back of Kensei’s head turned into a _burn_. He heard a whistling sound behind him, grabbed Perri and rolled over to his side as a long-bladed knife shot past Kensei’s shoulder, cutting into the shoulder of his jacket and impaling itself in the side of a train car.

            The knife’s owner came running down the platform, half-bent over and his feet making no sound in the dead silence following an attempt on someone’s life. He cackled faintly as he ran.

            And it was no mystery why. His body was covered in light brown fur with dark spots running up his arms. He had a canine-like face, the muzzle a little short and flat on the end with tall egg-shaped ears. Like a hyena. The only thing he wore was a red unitard with a yellow belt over it.

            “Come home with us, Perri,” he said, then started to cackle again.

            “I don’t want to go,” she whispered to Kensei. “Don’t let Hyena take me…”

            Kiiko crouched down and whispered to her, “We won’t.”

            Kensei stoo back up, En En Chambara in one hand and his Gamer Driver in the other. He locked the Driver onto his waist and then hit the trigger button. “ **Kenjutsu Level 2!** ” He faced the Hyena. “I’m giving you one chance. Back way.” Around them people were screamed and started fleeing in panic as they recognized a battle between two superbeings about to begin.

            The monster’s cackle was his first reply. “You know that’s never how it works, Rider,” he said.

            “I know,” Kensei answered. “But this isn’t just a game,” he added as he slotted the Gashat and his black and yellow undersuit raced out to cover his body. The pieces of his samurai armor appeared through the title screen of the game above him. They twirled through the air and attached themselves to his arms and legs, his helmet with its bright golden crescent rolling out last and landed on top of his head then locked in place with a click, completing the change to Kamen Rider Utsura.

            A press off a button on the side of his belt brought up a ring of boxy icons around him and Utsura tapped one. Immediately the train platform was gone, and they were standing in a Game Area simulating a dirt road surrounded by grass. Large pools of rice paddies covered an area running from where the two of them were standing over to a tall green wall in front of an even taller red pagoda.

            Hyena snapped his fingers and two long knives seemed to jump out of his palms before he clenched his furry fingers around them. Utsura responded by calling up another ring of icons around him and punching through one, causing a pair of wireframe short swords to form in his hands.

            Kiiko grabbed Perri by the hand, dragging her behind a cluster of cherry trees as Hyena dashed to the side and Utsura blocked him. The Rider held up his swords, forming a V with the blades as Hyena slashed with one of his knives. Utsura closed his weapons together like a scissors, pinning the knife before he leaned back and yanked the weapon out of Hyena’s hand.

            But the monster just cackled again as he cocked back his remaining blade. Utsura was faster than the monster seemed to be expecting and disarmed Hyena with a fierce upward swing from one sword. For a second Utsura spun like a tornado and got his enemy with both swords at the same time.

            The game monster was knocked through the air, but suddenly he crashed through something like a pane of glass and stopped. The empty air around him started to flicker and turned into the window of a train car, his legs dangling on the outside. Utsura stopped and stared in confusion as the scenery around where Hyena had landed pulled back to reveal the train platform, an ugly circle of miscolored pixels spreading out and breaking down the boundaries of the Game Area.

Suddenly a shadow jumped out of a crack in the tiles, something too tall and thin to be a real human, even if the nose hadn’t been almost a foot long. As it moved in front of Utsura to block him another shape formed out of big blocky particles into a white-faced vampire in a tacky red jumpsuit. The vampire flashed his fangs and hissed menacingly at the Rider, who cleaved through him with a strong downward swing from both swords.

            With a hiss of pain the vampire split in two and then exploded, peppering the platform with shiny blocks. The shadow tried to grab Utsura but his sword flashed out and cut through its fluttering arm. The shadow jerked back, its mouth dropping open in surprise before Utsura sliced through it horizontally with both blades, then down from its head to its hips. It popped and broke down into black blocks like the vampire had. As Utsura pullzed back the wakizashi in his hands, though, a weird blue-yellow static drifted back and forth across it exposing bits of the wireframe through the cover.

            Perri and Kiiko watched the fight unfolding from behind a metal pillar holding up the ceiling. “Shouldn’t we be running?” Perri asked.

            “No,” Kiiko replied quietly. “If he has minions around here, there’s probably even more near here to try to get you if you run. We’re safer here, where Kensei-kun can come help us if something happens.”

            By then Hyena had flipped back onto his feet as the Game Area broke down completely. Light caught on the tip of his knife as its owner cackled again. “Think you can pull that off again, Rider?” he taunted.

            “I might be worried if you brought some tougher friends than those two!” Utsura retorted.

            His enemy laughed, and it was lower than his normal cackling call. “You have no idea how strong our forces are.”

            “Then show me. Since you’re the one who’s not afraid.”

            That was when Hyena threw himself at Utsura, his knife aimed at the Rider’s midriff. Utsura swung a sword to parry the attack again, but Hyena’s knife passed right through the blade as the wireframe flickered into visibility and the top of the wakizashi cracked and then shattered. Hyena’s weapon jabbed into his body, a giant HIT! graphic appearing at the point of impact. Utsura gasped in pain and staggered as three marks disappeared off his heath bar at once.

            Kiiko gasped and covered her mouth as she saw an ugly blue bruise form on the yellow of his undersuit. In another instant it spread all over Utsura, the armor over his feet and shoulders, the crescent on his helmet starting to flicker through solidity and the green lines of their wireframes underneath.

            But the horror of that was nothing compared to what Utsura himself saw. Behind Hyena weird flickering blocks rolled together into a shape and size like a human being. Then it solidified into a face he recognized: it was Yuuma Hidenaga, his older brother. His handsome face had been badly ravaged, with his skin ashy grey like a zombies and his eyes red and sunken in, his clothes dirty and ragged. He looked down at Utsura, his mouth hanging open in disappointment, maybe even fear. He looked over at Hyena, then turned away and buried his face in his hands before he disappeared.

            Cold tingles ran up the Rider’s arms. Utsura’s other sword swung out slower than before, and Hyena laughed, exposing his teeth in a horrible grin. Then he caught the flickering blade in his hand and squeezed, making pink blocks go flying away from the shattered weapon. Utsura retreated, tossing away his destroyed swords. As he’d been expecting Hyena came after him, jabbing with his knife and laughing louder at his enemy.

            And as he did Utsura pressed the x3 button on the back of his Mighty Hand. The glove shook with power before it spread to his whole body. Just before Hyena could stab him again Utsura turned into a red and yellow blur as the knife cut through the air where he’d been standing. In the next instant Utsura’s fist swung up and connected with the furry monster’s jaw. Another one of his laughs stopped in the middle as he was knocked flat on his back.

            Utsura turned to check back on Kiiko and Perri, but whatever Hyena had infected him with seemed to be spreading faster. They could see his real eye behind the giant ones in his mask, then his entire face would be seen.

            “Let’s get out of here!” he yelled.

            The girls stood up and ran for the stairs at the end of the platform with Utsura following them. He lurched forward as his boots flickered like he’d been expecting to have more weight in his feet, gasped and rolled down the last few stairs after them.

As he landed on the bottom his armor flickered away completely, and Kensei pulled the Gashat out of his belt. It hissed and almost jumped around in his hand, its circuit panel covered in a cloud of blue static.

“What’s happening?” he gasped. “Why did I see—” Kensei started to gasp, then stopped himself. Yuuma…had that been part of Hyena’s infection, or something else?

A huge dark shape appeared in the sky then started getting larger, the sky seeming to get darker as it came down. It was another monster, a grey-feathered vulture the size of a man. He shrieked and tried to bite Kensei’s face as he came down. Before he could touch Kensei an ice spear suddenly shot out and smashed into him.

The vulture went into a crazy spin over their heads, but Kensei smiled in relief as he saw another giant bird coming their way. It looked like a huge yellow ostrich, and had another Kamen Rider on its back wearing a long purple robe and holding a staff in one hand.

“Glad you could make it!” he called to Rune.

“I’m sorry for having a life!” Rune called back as he pulled the Cocobobo he was riding to a stop.

            “Yeah, right!” Kiiko yelled. “You were so late because you were trying to get to a save point so you wouldn’t have to do a dungeon over in some game, I bet!”

            “I did not! I left the system running so I wouldn’t lose my progress!”

            “WATCH OUT!!” Kensei yelled to interrupt their exchange. “Those monsters have some kind of power that cancels out the Gashats! The one I was just fighting even got rid of a Game Area!”

            Rune looked over and Kensei thought he could see disbelief in the giant eyes of the wizard-Rider’s mask. But then the vulture-man had turned around and was coming back to attack again, the exposed red skin of its head turning darker, maybe in anticipation of the kill.

When Rune shot a jet of fire from his staff, the vulture-man suddenly flew up, a trail of blue smoke flowing from his wings that covered Rune’s body. Patches of his cloak started flickering, the bird he was riding going completely rigid before changing back into just a wireframe model and then disappearing totally. Within another few seconds his armor was gone too, and only a confused Doku Dasao was left lying on the street.

            The vulture-man landed and started to walk closer to where Kiiko and Perri were standing behind some stairs. “Come back with us, Perri,” he said. “You’re being so cruel to the Doctor…he misses you so much.”

            “No!” Perri screamed. “I won’t help him! Stay away, Scavenger! All of you! I won’t go back!”

            “Perri,” Scavenger, the vulture-man, squawked. His beak seemed to form itself into a mocking grin. “How are you going to stop us?”

            “I won’t let you,” Kensei said even as the Gashat in his hand twitched. He jumped in between Scavenger and where the girls hid. Scavenger laughed, like he’d been expecting it, and swiped at the powerless teen with his wings. The feathers seemed to sharpen themselves into knives as they came at Kensei’s neck.

            Then there was the sound of a shot. A blast of grey blocks flew from Scavenger’s shoulder where the shot landed. The monster spun around to face the one who’d shot him. There, in blue armor and aiming a smoking blue and white six-shooter at him, angry oversized eyes peering out from under the wide brim of his hat, was Kamen Rider Sling.

            “You really do have this much trouble when I’m not around, huh?” Sling asked. Scavenger spread his wings but Sling fired his gun in a steady diagonal burst that bit into the monster’s wings and kept him from flying off again.

            Scavenger squawked slowly, but after a minute it got louder and it was obvious he was laughing. “You think that holding me off will protect her?” he asked. “That there are only a few of us? Our forces come from every game, they cover every type imaginable! Show them how powerful we are, White Rhino!”

            Suddenly something huge and white charged around the street corner, turning so harshly it smashed through the concrete and rebar of the building with no resistance. It crashed into Sling, sent him tumbling like a ragdoll and covering him with that blue smoke or static, or whatever it really was. His armor flickered all over and then faded away like the other Riders’.

As his attacker stopped the could finally make it out, a huge musclebound man, but with the head and horns of a rhinoceros, the tip giving off the smoke. The only thing he wore was tight blue pants and a pair of dull bronze bracelets. He roared and pounded his chest while Scavenger made his squawking laugh, and both stepped closer to the powerless teens.

“Run!” Kensei yelled. White Rhino bellowed and charged after the youths as they ran away. Kensei himself hung back, limping after his friends. White Rhino turned after him, seeing an easy target, and after the horned juggernaut got closer Kensei suddenly broke into a run and jumped over the roof of a car.

White Rhino crashed right through the car, but there was no sign of Kensei when the surprised monster pried his horn out of the wall. Scavenger hovered nearby, looking around and hissing, sounding extremely annoyed. Hyena danced up beside the others, chattering again as he twirled twin knives, one on the index finger of each hand.

            “Looks like they got away from you,” he laughed at the other monsters.

            “They got away from you first,” Scavenger squawked angrily.

            White Rhino started shaking his hands from side to side and looked around nervously. “Doctor Morbis isn’t going to like this,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice.

            “He prepared us for this,” Scavenger replied.

            He held up a Rider Gashat. Its case was transparent, revealing the circruit board inside. The label showed a young boy falling back as a dragon, a ninja, a spaceship shaped like a winged arrowhead and an eyeball with metal tentacles came out of his TV screen. The name on it was Action 52, and the panel sticking out of the top was giving off a fountain of the same blue smoke that had disabled the Riders’ powers.

            With his taloned thumb, Scavenger pressed the trigger button. The game crackled and fizzled instead of giving a loud activation at first, as if it couldn’t connect with its own data. “ **Crrrgggt! Frzzzt! 52 games in 1! Zzzrrrrrf! They’re smooth! _Like ice!_ A game a week _for an entire year_!**” it finally exclaimed.

            Small, dark shapes started to shoot up out of the Gashat’s circuit board. As they got higher they changed into more definite forms. Bats. Small dragons. Meteors. Fighter ships in a variety of poorly-conceived shapes and images. Triangular medieval shields floated up along with the others.

            Then in the sky, they started to spread out in all directions and buzzing like a cloud of angry, badly-drawn hornets.

 

XXX

 

            A single gigantic scream seemed to go up at once as streams of ugly pixelated spaceships flew lower between buildings, parts of some of them flickering between totally out of place colors against the rest of their armor.

            A few of them flew extremely low, crashing into the middle of a row of traffic and a group of cars blowing up into clouds of flames that strangely seemed to stop billowing, then turned into the stark yellow and red of low resolution 8-bit graphics.

            More of the ugly spaceships buzzed the people on the streets, who were already fleeing in panic into any doorway or down any side street close enough. A man in a tight grey suit fell, the spot between his shoulders giving off tiny clouds of pixelated smoke from a projectile just barely recognizable as a laser beam.

            A golden shield crashed through the eighth-floor window of an office then flew through like a battering ram overturning computers and desks, and one screaming lady too slow to dodge out of the way.

            One ship crashed into the side of a building, its pixels tumbling through the air. One landed at a man’s feet and suddenly changed into a bulging sack with a yen symbol on the front. Gasping at his good fortune he reached out to grab it, then screamed in pain as it started burning his hand.

            In the middle of it all, the powerless Kamen Riders were running form shadow to shadow in the spaces between the big buildings. Fiery explosions with visible pixel seams between the parts erupted around them. Yoshoku pulled Kiiko away from the edge of a blast as a car went up in flames behind them, and the singes to her clothes and skin were plenty real.

            “What do we do??” Doku asked once a patrol of spaceships flew past without noticing them and he dared to step away from in front of Perri.

            “We regroup,” Kensei answered.

            Yoshoku scowled as squadrons of mismatched game enemies flew by. “We shouldn’t be running,” he hissed. “We should be ending this.”

            “We would. If we had anything to fight with,” Doku replied.

            “I know,” Yoshoku replied, scowling more intense than when they’d been rivals.

 

XXX

 

            After ten minutes of watching the skies and the path behind them, they slipped into the Seitou University Hospital building. Getting in a certain elevator and then tapping in a code on the buttons—Basement twice, First Floor, Door Open and Door Close at the same time—it dropped so fast Perri’s gasp at the speed turned into a gulp as the air was suddenly forced up out of her lungs.

            Kiiko covered her mouth, but Kensei could tell she was chuckling a little at the little girl’s surprise.

            “Where are we going?” Perri managed to wheeze out.

            “To the secret hideout!” Doku said, grinning down at her.

            Perri looked up at him, her jaw dropping in disbelief. “You have a secret hideout?!”

            “Of course we do,” Yoshoku chimed in. “The other Kamen Riders used to use it, now we do.”

            The elevator stopped and they walked down a short hall into the CR room. As soon as they were inside Kensei got a bottle of antiseptic and a cotton swab out of a first aid box and walked over to Kiiko. “…what are you going to do with those?” she asked nervously.

            “You’re burnt. Hold still.”

            “Nooooooo! That hurts!” Kiiko dodged as Kensei tried to clean the burn mark on her arm. She jumped over the meeting table away from him and back into a corner on the platform. Kensei patiently walked around to where she’d gone, and Kiko shrieked, jumped over the rail on the edge of the platform, climbed down and dropped onto the lower floor.

            He walked after her again. “Kiiko, it’s so it doesn’t get infected.”

            “Yeah, you should listen!” Perri called down the stairs. “I wish I had a nice boyfriend who looked out for me like that!”

            Kensei went rigid in the middle of his step and almost missed the next one. “W—w—w—we’re not going out,” he managed to stammer.

            “…that…THAT’S RIGHT!” Kiiko yelled back up the stairs. “Besides, kids your age shouldn’t think about things like that!”

            “Kiiko, _you_ act like a kid with how you always just make me play video games with you,” Kensei mentioned.

            She turned red and pointed an accusing finger at him. “You were no good at games until I started training you!”

            “He’s _still_ no good at games,” Doku interrupted. “Hidenaga, how about you let _me_ train you from now on?”

            “Tch! Are you kidding?” Yoshoku spoke up too. “What do either of them know? You learned more from your brother, Hidenaga.”

            Suddenly a huge shadow fell over the two of them. It was Kiiko, except she’d seemed to have grown to ten feet tall and her eyes were glowing like exploding stars. “What did you say about my training?” she growled.

            Then Kensei appeared next to her and rubbed a swap of iodine on the burn wound. She flinched in surprise then yelped as the sting set in.

            And then all of them noticed Perri giggling. “Oh my god…you guys are really the Kamen Riders?”

            “Even the best sentai have funny moments,” Kensei replied as he grabbed Kiiko around the middle to keep her from running away as he cleaned off her arm, but he was smirking a little as he did.

            Doku sighed. “Without our Gashats that’s all we are, the comic relief,” he said and set down his Taddle Craft cart. It still shook and hissed almost like a living thing. There was even a POP and it jumped an inch off the meeting table. Yoshoku put his Bang Bang Sunset cart down next to it and stepped back.

            Even Kensei put En En Chambara on the table as thick, cloud-like blue haze passed over the shaking power item. The three Gashats seemed to sense each other, and shook and crackled as whatever the monsters had done to them crawled back and forth through their colorful cases. He sighed as he looked down at them, the basis of their power. Kensei had a feeling all three of them were thinking the same thing.

            It was like part of himself was gone. Like he was less of a person than he’d been before getting into a fight with Hyena. Doku sighed too and looked down helplessly at the sources of their power, his earlier enthusiasm from showing Perri the hideout gone.

            “Mmmrgh,” Perri suddenly groaned. She clutched the sides of her head, her eyes squeezed shut. She jerked it from side to side, as if she thought she was trying to fight off a persistent headache. Doku was reaching out for her shoulder to help her, then her eyes snapped open and an excited smile formed on her face. “I REMEMBER!”

            Doku recoiled in surprised, but Yoshoku leaned forward. “What do you remember?” he asked.

            “About other games you can use!” Perri exclaimed. “Kuro-san told me! I just remembered!”

            “…you did?” Doku asked after he’d recovered. “That’s a really important thing.”

            “Yeah, it is,” Yoshoku added. “Kind of surprising you’d just forget something that like,” he said, eyes narrowing a little.

            The next thing he knew Doku was standing between them. “She’s a kid, okay?” he said defensively. “Cut her some slack.”

            Yoshoku folded his arms and tapped his bicep with his finger. He leaned and whispered in Kensei’s direction. “Back me up, Hidenaga: isn’t this all a little convenient? This _kid_ we know nothing about shows up right before we get attacked, then when our weapons get taken out, suddenly she knows where to get replacements. _And_ she says the guy telling her all this is the same one who almost destroyed the world.”

            “It _is_ kind of convenient,” Kensei admitted. “But we’re already trapped pretty well just by losing our power. Besides, let’s not forget how that same guy eventually teamed up with the other Kamen Riders to _save_ the world.”

            “Yeah,” Yoshoku replied, his face still hard. “So he could survive until he had a chance to fix his plan.”

            “Yeah well, we don’t have _any_ plan right now. And your mother would help somebody in trouble like Perri, right? You in, or not?” Kensei asked

            Giving Kensei a withering look, Yoshoku answered, “Fine, I’m in. But I’m going into this looking for a trap.”

            To his surprise, Kensei put a hand on his shoulder, and smiled over at him. “I’ll be counting on you to watch our backs.” Kensei turned away from him and back to Perri, “Can you show us where the other games are?”

            “Guys!” Doku said as they started following Perri out. “I think I managed to put it all together…those monsters we fought, all those weird different enemies that looked badly made, I think I remember why they looked familiar.”

            “Well, don’t leave us in suspense,” Yoshoku prompted.

            “It’s from a game called Action 52. It’s supposed to be one of the worst-made games _ever_.”

 

XXX

 

            More and more spaceships, dragons, and rockets straddled by cowboys twirling laser lariats over their heads were filling the sky. Through the dark, ugly stream overhead, it was almost impossible to see a black island floating above as it came down, especially with how it flickered in and out of sight every few seconds.

            The island came down, covering five blocks on every side. It was covered by what looked like a brown rocky mountain one minute. As it touched down the outside of the mountain peeled away, leaving a tower of shiny black boxes. A second later windows lit up on its sides, and the ground around its based sprouted smaller buildings.

            The city around one edge flickered and then turned into a grey, cratered-covered surface like moon. It got to the end of a block and stayed a crater-covered lunar surface but turned a tropical green. Another block and the rocks became a bright berry purple. On another side a forest of identical trees in perfectly symmetrical rows spread over the buildings. In another direction an 8-bit version of a sleepy Mexican village with clay houses and a street barely wide enough for two people to walk down side by side, fenced in by round bushes and littered with colorful sombreros.

            At the very top of the shiny black tower at the center of all the unfolding chaos, a man in a green jumpsuit with yellow stripes running along the shoulder. His face was craggy and just one side of distinguished. His hair was black and thinning, forming into a short widow’s peak on his forehead and a scraggly mustache and goatee.

            “I hope you have good news for me, Cygore,” the man said as the door slammed closed behind the man who’d just entered. He was a slight, stooped man, wearing a dark green apron and gaudy yellow pants. He had a wispy skullet, black hair hanging down past his shoulders while his forehead was so bald and shiny it seemed to give off a light of its own. The man’s nose was long and pointed, almost looking like a bird’s beak. His right arm was gone, replaced by a mechanical prosthetic ending in a metal pincer.

            “Yes, Doctor Morbis,” Cygore answered in a high, nasal voice. “Scavenger’s found the girl, and made sure none of her friends have left the building they snuck into. More of our forces are closing in to surround the area.”

            The doctor whipped around, a scowl on his severe face. “Not good enough!” he snapped. “Only she can make us complete! Why didn’t the Sub-Species secure her in the first attack?!” Doctor Morbis held up his gloved hand, block-shaped sections flickering into different colors and then into complete transparency. “Even _I_ can’t keep this up for ever, Cygore!”

            “Doctor,” his assistant whined, “I wasn’t even there! Besides, you made _them_ to be the fighters! I just work in the lab!”

            Morbis took a step back and sighed, pushing the palm of his glove against his face. “Speaking of,” he asked less harshly. “how is the final member of the group coming?”

            Cygore’s face lit up. “The Ape-Man’s all ready! He broke his way out of the tube! A tank couldn’t have blown through that glass, but he did it with his bare hands!”

            “Man-Ape, idiot,” Doctor Morbis corrected his assistant. “Get him ready to fight. Evidently, we can’t afford to pull our punches.”

            “With all due respect, Doctor, the Kamen Riders are helpless. They’re just kids now,” his assistant said, thoughtfully twirling the claw on his arm, then immediately regretted it. Doctor Morbis stared at him so coldly that Cygore was sure icicles were forming on the knife-like end of his nose.

            The temperature seemed to drop more as a furious silence covered the room like some kind of evil, suffocating blanket. Cygore was about to turn and run, even though he knew it would do him no good, when Doctor Morbis answered. “We shouldn’t count them out yet.”

            “Yes, Doctor! You’re the boss!” Cygore said. Then he turned and ran out of the room before Doctor Morbis changed his mind again.

 

XXX

 

            The five youths stopped and looked around one last time for any sign of game enemies. Once they all gave a nod that the coast was clear they made their way to the rust-spotted back door of the filthy concrete building Perri had directed them to through their tense trip through town.

            On the way over, Doku had told them what he knew about Action 52: “I heard about it because of a video on the internet, when this guy reviewed a comic about the Cheetahmen, who were the mascots of this obscure game that was supposed to be _really_ bad. It was called Action 52 because it was a cart with fifty-two built in games.”

            “And you can tell all those things were from that game because you can just _recognize_ them?” Yoshoku had asked, more than a little incredulously.

            Doku had frowned at him then. “Those three monsters we fought were some of the main villains from the comic, thank you. And I checked out some videos of Action 52 after that, and they were all a mess of half-made, broken games that were just _embarrassing_! Even for video games back then!”

            A cold trickle of anxiety then seeped down Kensei’s spine and seemed to settle in the bottom of his stomach. “Those games are so broken and they broke the Rider Gashats too?” he voiced his fear.

            No-one had said anything after that. On the way Kensei was sure he saw the corrupted version of his brother again, but before he could make a move Yuuma was gone again.

            The building Perri led them too was dark and empty, but by the light of their smartphones she took them to an old office and pulled a rusted, useless-looking switch almost hidden behind a battered desk. Her proud smile returned as the lights in the office and all down the hall came on.

            “Not bad,” Yoshoku admitted. “Dan was stealing power, and they never figured out how even after they caught him looks like.”

            “He was pretty smart,” Perri said with a nod.

            But Kensei put his hand on her shoulder. “We’ll see if that’s true after we get those Gashats he hid.”

            “He was, you’ll see!” Perri replied. A few minutes later they entered into a large room with a bank of electric meters against the wall and a loading door on the corner next to them. There were still a few black folding tables set up around the room, probably left over from when Kuroto Dan had been hiding out there while on the run from the police.

            Kiiko pressed her fingers to her temples and shut her eyes. “There’s something here. It does feel like a sleeping Gashat.”

            While they talked Perri had stepped away and was running her fingers over a strip of rough concrete at the bottom of a wall. Her fingernail sank into a hidden seam, and Perri grinned as she pulled open on a concealed panel. Inside was a thick silver briefcase that she took out and dropped on one of the old tables.

            She started fiddling with combination locks on the case, and Doku and Yoshoku stepped away for space as they waited for her to finish. Kiiko looked over at Kensei, who was leaning against the wall, staring at his feet. “Kensei-kun, is everything all right?”

            He looked up at Kiiko and smiled a little, but his eyes seemed tired as they met hers. “About as good as they can be, with game monsters all over town,” he answered.

            Kiiko was about to press her question when there was a loud click. The top of the briefcase sprang open and Perri led out a triumphant yip. They came over and saw three Rider Gashats resting in a cut block of foam.

            The first one had a bright blue case, showing a superhero in a gaudy costume; green on the torso with a yellow stripe down the front, bright blue sleeves and legs with blindingly white gloves and boots. He had on a yellow hood and white goggles with a silvery spike on the front of his mask as well. The logo above the character said BRAVOMAN – SUPER UNEQUALLED HERO OF EXCELLENCE!

            Second was a white one showing a man in a white suit and helmet, a big red chevron on the chest, using an air pump to inflate a round red monster with a yellow diving mask on. The logo said DIG DUG.

            The third and last had a dark purple case, the label showing a winged, blue-scaled Western-style dragon. A pair of long yellow horns reached back from the top of its head, and from the look in its narrowed amber eyes it almost seemed to be challenging the person looking back to play. It was sitting on the logo, which said DRAGON SPIRIT.

            As they inspected the games, Perri reached inside the top of the case and pushed a small black button hidden in a corner. A cone of light gushed out of a spot in the middle of the top of the case, and in it formed a hologram of a slender, handsome man in a dark suit, but whose smile seemed somewhat condescending. Perri squealed and grinned as she recognized him.

            “Greetings, players! It is I, God Kuroto Dan!” he said, holding his arms out at his sides in greeting, as if waiting for praise he couldn’t hear. He then held up his fingers as he addressed his audience. “If you’ve discovered this then the game has taken an unexpected turn.”

            While Kuroto launched into his schpiel, Kensei palmed the Dragon Spirit game as surreptitiously as he could.

            “What you see in front of you are games representing _history_. You may not even have known they exist. That is why they make the perfect wild card: the old are usually forgotten, overlooked, and underestimated. Whoever is threatening my glorious vision will never expect the power these games contain.”

            Doku and Yoshoku gave each other a look. “Nice to keep your priorities straight,” Yoshoku muttered. Perri shushed him.

And Kuroto went on. “Yet their status as legendary games, their place in history gives them great protective powers. So, players, champions, arm yourselves and strike down the blasphemers who challenge the gamemaster’s design!” he exclaimed, gazing upward and waving his arms out to his sides as if staring up at something majestic. Then he suddenly leaned forward and said in a sharp whisper. “And don’t even think about rebelling against me with those. It won’t work.”

The hologram flickered out and the light feeding it flicked off. “That’s some awfully forward thinking, from what I remember seeing of the guy,” Doku spoke up.

“Maybe these weren’t strong enough to make a difference by the time things were really happening,” Yoshoku replied.

“Let’s hope they’re strong enough to solve _our_ problem,” Kensei put in. Then he immediately walked away from the case. As Doku and Yoshoku reached out for a new Gashat they saw the empty spot, and started to spin around when they saw something that stopped them all cold.

A thick, syrupy blue puddle was oozing under the loading door behind them. It seemed toinflate, pushing the door up with a horrible metal clattering from the rusted wheels being forced up the contorted tracks.

            “Get ready!” Kensei yelled unnecessarily, his new Gashat already held up as he positioned himself between Perri and the blob.

            The door slammed into place at the top of the track. Standing on the other side were White Rhino and Hyena, the deranged monster laughing as he licked the blade of his knife. In the sky behind them a dark shape hovered, Scavenger the vulture-man.

            “We’re done asking nicely, Perri,” White Rhino growled, then huffed threateningly through his huge nostrils.

            “What do they even want?” Doku whispered to her.

            “They want me to make things like this forever,” she whispered back. “I don’t want to go…I don’t want the world to be broken!”

Doku squeezed her hand and she smiled weakly. Then he suddenly let go and charged the two game monsters. Following his lead Yoshoku and Kensei ran after him, awkwardly jumping over the puddle of blue slime on the ground. The two monsters were so surprised by the Riders charging them with no armor they actually jumped back.

            “Now!” Doku yelled and raised the Gashat he’d grabbed and hit the trigger. “ **Dig Dug Dig Dug DIG!!! Pooka Pop! Fygar Flop! Collect veggie treasures!** ” His normal black and green undersuit formed over him as the title screen showing Dig Dug inflating a round red Pooka appeared above. A boxy white Gamer floated out then split apart and attached itself to him. A white crash helmet with a blue rectangular bar on top and matching visor came over his head, cube-like shoulder pads were next and then a chunky white chest plate with a red chevron on the front was the last piece. His Gamer Septa had changed into a short white rod, and he twisted the knob on it causing a ring of icons to appear around him. He hit one showing a dark brown mine shaft.

            Hyena spun his knife on the tip of one hairy finger as he came closer to Yoshoku, who lifted the Bravoman game defiantly and hit the trigger. “C **houzetzu Rinjin! Who is rising against me? I’m your friend from Planet Alfa! ‘You’re cool, but rude’ – I don’t get it! BERABOH!** ” it sang as he loaded the game into his gun and hit the trigger. The title screen of Bravoman leaning back as an army of robots and ninja came storming down at him appeared. A Gamer with a green center, blue appendages and white hands and feet bounced out of the screen, a long red scarf trailing through the air behind it. It hopped in crazy circles around Hyena a few times, the furry monster yelping in surprise and jumping back to keep it from crushing him.

            Then it broke apart as the Gamers always did, and Yoshoku, now Sling, jumped into the air out of instinct as the bottom part came bouncing his way. His feet came down inside and they locked down on his undersuit, becoming blue pants with white boots that came up his knees. The main body of the Gamer came down over him next, covering his torso with a green shirt with a yellow stripe down the middle, and sleeves and gloves that matched his legs. The top spun a few times before it attached over his head, becoming a yellow hood with thick blue goggles over the big eyes of the goggles he already wore, with a lightly arcing needle-like fin sticking out of the top of those goggles. Around his neck was tied a long scarf that was a dark, heroic red in color.

             Hyena had gotten over his surprise, and somehow snarled and laughed at the same time, stabbing the air with his knife. Sling called up a circle of icons showing Game Areas and tapped it with one gloved finger.

            Kensei’s hand was shaking as he clutched the new Gashat, but he managed to steady it and said, “Let’s play.” He hit the trigger. “ **The spirit fills you! Fly the wings of hope! Now the NEW DRAGON LEGEND is ready to begin! My sister IRIS is the scariest!** ” He slammed the Gashat into his belt and immediately his yellow and black undersuit unfurled over his body.

A massive Gamer the size of a car drifted out of the Dragon Spirit title screen, a horned blue dragon like the one on the label of the game. It shook its long neck back and forth, pushing the fighters around Utsura away with the force of its wings. Then it split apart and clamped down on Utsura as armor. The head came down over his, the jaw dropping down and covering his chest with his face peering out through its mouth. Chunky shoulder armor and a chest plate covering his health bar came next, covered in a pattern like rough blue scales. Heavy blue greaves with a silver-colored bar on the front and curved yellow fin on the sides closed over his feet. Lastly heavy gauntlets made of silver-colored bands over his arms that had a working of a dragon’s head sticking out over his hands with golden horns trailing back over the forearm.

As soon as his new transformation completed Scavenger seemed to come dive-bombing at him, beak open letting out a terrifying scream. The crackling smoke that had put the Riders out of action before was trailing from his wings as he raked the talons on his feet against Utsura’s thicker armor. It covered the Rider while Scavenger beat his giant wings and rose back into the sky.

But Utsura stepped out of the fog, a few puffs of the smoke from his enemy’s wings crackling against his armor before dissipating. Like the others he called up a circle of icons and tapped one. As the world around him shifted, eight-foot wings expanded out of his new armor’s back.

 

XXX

 

“We have to go now, Perri,” Kiiko said as she pulled the younger girl’s arm, being more serious than she ever had about anything.

“I’m not done yet,” she complained, leaning away from Kiiko and trying to hook the edge of the case the new Rider Gashats came in.

“NOW, Perri!” Kiiko shouted, just as the little girl’s fear-sweat-soaked hand slipped out of her grip. Perri yanked the block of foam out of the case and threw it away, almost hitting Kiiko in the face with it. Underneath was another rectangular object, one that Perri grabbed and slipped inside her shirt.

By then Kiiko had grabbed her wrist again and was dragging out the other door of the hideout. Perri didn’t resist anymore. Instead she smiled gently as she cradled the bump hidden inside her shirt.

Those creepy game monsters hadn’t gotten Kuro-san’s masterpiece. And they wouldn’t get it. No matter what.

 

XXX

 

The Game Area closed completely over White Rhino, who snorted in warning to his Rider opponent. He was standing in a tunnel with walls of brown dirt. A faint light seemed to come from somewhere even though the massive game monster was surrounded on all sides by dirt and rock. But Kamen Rider Rune had disappeared somewhere while the dank tunnel was forming.

Figuring, as he always did, that the best defense was a good offense, White Rhino bellowed loudly and took off down the tunnel at a ground-shaking run. His big feet tore up the ground leaving a cloud of dirt behind him as he ran, lowering his horn to meet Rune’s spine when he caught up with the Rider.

Thanks to all the dust his juggernaut charge sent billowing up, he didn’t see the hole in the floor until he was two steps away.

The warning cry he’d been yelling turned into a scream of terror and surprise as the ground broke away under him and White Rhino plummeted down the pit. Everything turned into a brown blur around him before he hit the floor of another tunnel what seemed like an hour later, blasting dirt down all the branches of the T-junction.

Once he’d managed to peel himself off the floor he leaned against the wall, trying to rub all the dust from his beady eyes with his big clumsy fingers. He didn’t see it coming when a figure with a bright blue light shining from the top of his helmet ran up and landed a powerful flying kick on his side.

White Rhino whipped around, his horn aimed at the shape’s heart. “There you are!” he yelled as he stabbed at Rune. The Rider lifted the rod in his hands and blocked Rhino’s attack. Blue fog like before trickled off the tip but slid right past Rune. Rhino stopped pushing forward for a second as he was sure he heard Rune chuckling, then the Rider lunged forward and slammed his knee into the mutant’s chin with surprising force.

Then before White Rhino could recover Rune tapped the button on his weapon and a wide drill bit popped out of one end. He stuck it against the wall and the dirt flew away from him digging a new tunnel. This time, though, White Rhino had a target in sight and charged again, right behind Rune.

He ran right underneath a boulder as it broke loose from the dirt in the roof of Rune’s new tunnel.

 

XXX

 

Boxy nodes of the edges of the Game Area closed together into an empty construction site just before the knife flew at Sling’s heart. The Rider gasped and to his surprise his legs suddenly stretched up until his head was almost ten feet off the ground when he stopped. The weapon went by underneath without doing any damage.

His legs retracted again and Sling went on the attack before Hyena had a chance to throw another blade. There was a lot of empty space between them, but he always already figuring out that didn’t matter…

Sling threw a straight right at Hyena’s face and the “extra” arm from the Gamer on top of his real one stretched out and the fist smashed into the mutant’s jaw, his jeering laugh turning into a squawk of pain.

            It slid back to its normal shape, and as Sling threw another stretching punch with his left he heard a muffled “ **BERABOH!** ” come from the voice of his gun its holster. Hyena gasped and ducked, sending Sling’s fist whizzing overhead. Sling ducked too and threw a kick with his leg extending out at lightning speed, catching the mutant in the stomach with the full span of his boot.

            Sling stood up and planted his other boot, the leg stretching out and extending him fifteen feet off the ground. The leg retracted with him still in the air, and he came down with his other foot aimed at Hyena. When his kick connected with the dazed mutant Hyena could only gasp as he was knocked to the ground. As soon as Sling landed he went into a crouch and threw another extending punch that caught Hyena in the chest and pushed him along the ground until Sling’s arm got to its maximum length then snapped back.

            Guessing he had one trick he still hadn’t tried, Sling thrust his shoulders forward. The helmet stretched off his shoulders on a blue coil just like his arms and legs did in this form, colliding with Hyena’s forehead. Knives went flying from his hands straight up into the air, all of them sinking into the ground tip-first in a circle around Hyena’s unconscious body.

 

XXX

 

            A majestic green forest with a river branching through it appeared below them, completely contradicting the screeching giant vulture coming at Utsura like a wrecking ball and trailing smoke from his wings.

            Utsura’s wings beat hard and pushed him backward out of Scavenger’s way, the edge of the smoke trail covering him but washing off as it did before. The Rider sighed in relief; “the power of history”, or whatever the heck Kuroto had been talking about, seemed like a pretty powerful defense after all.

            He leaned down and flew after Scavenger, going on the offensive. Dragon Spirit was a game he’d never played before, but how much could there be to figure out about being a dragon?

            Banking around to keep Scavenger in front of him, Utsura held out one arm. The dragon head on the end glowed then roared just as it spewed a fireball. The sizzling projectile flew and exploded between Scavenger’s shoulders. The mutant’s beak jerked open in a cry of pain drowned out by the explosive burst before he started going down, circling crazily toward the treetops below.

            Utsura tucked in his wings and went into a dive after Scavenger. He knew the mutant probably still had some fight left in him and wasn’t about to let himself be suckered into another bad position like when he’d underestimated Hyena before. The Rider aimed his other arm at the falling Scavenger and the dragon’s face on the front flared with light before a smaller shot arced forward and fell like a bomb, exploding as it hit Scavenger too.

            As his second shot hit home, Utsura saw someone standing in a break between some of the trees underneath him and froze.

            Even from that high up, Utsura’s sharpened eyes could make out every detail. The ashy skin color. The dirty and ragged clothes. The despairing look on his pale face. It was the zombie-like version of Yuuma Hidenaga that Utsura had seen in his last fight. His eyes seemed to burn through the Kamen Rider’s mask even that high in the sky, and Utsura could see him whisper the words, “How could you fail us?”

            The next thing Utsura knew something had crashed into his back and was tightening clawed fingers around his throat. It could only be Scavenger, but even though Utsura aimed a fireball over one shoulder the stranglehold on his neck just got even tighter. Blackness started creeping in from the edges of his eyes.

            Then there was a loud TWANG and Scavenger screeched and let go. The ground seemed to spin but Utsura’s wings sprang all the way out and stopped his fall. He went into a circling glide, letting him get his bearings. There was no sign of his brother on the ground, but Utsura did see someone else. It was a man with the head and fur of a cheetah, wearing a white gi and a black belt with a dark blue buckle.

            And in one hand was a loaded crossbow pointed to the sky.

            The cheetah fired his shot. It went wide of Utsura’s shoulder by a few feet and hit Scavenger who turned around and flew to a safe distance while Utsura finished coming down a decent distance away from the cheetah. He squinted, trying to gauge what the new entrant in the fight wanted.

            But he kept it aimed at the ground.

            Then the cheetah spoke in a crisp British accept. “I say, dear chap, don’t you think you should keep your eyes on your enemy?”

            “Who are you?” Utsura demanded.

            With unbelievable speed—how much from his species and how much from skill, Utsura could only guess—the cheetah whisked another bolt out of a quiver on his back and reloaded his weapon.

            Then he looked Utsura straight in the visor and answered, “My ‘father’ named me Apollo.”

 

XXX

 

            In the tunnel, White Rhino managed to work enough space under his arm to punch the boulder and send a thin crack shooting all the way to the top. Another punch and crack the widened. Then a third punch and his fist blasted through the stone, smashing it into a storm of rocky splinters.

            “I’m stronger than you think, Rider!” White Rhino roared. He spotted Rune turning to run off down the tunnel again and lowered his head as he charged after the young hero. He’d taken a few gigantic steps before suddenly he heard a high-pitched roar and something grabbed him from behind, hooking a pair of powerful arms over his own in a full nelson.

            Rune stopped suddenly as he heard White Rhino struggling behind him. Something else had attacked his enemy? Since when did Game Areas spawn other enemies? But then he saw who was wrestling with White Rhino and recognized them.

            It was a cheetah-faced man with huge shoulders and biceps, whose white shirt and pants were secured by a black belt, the buckle showing a black baobab tree over a red background. The fur on top of his head was styled into a buzzcut.

            And Rune recognized him.

            “Hercules!”

            The cheetahman looked up. “ ‘Ey, you talkin’ to _me_?” he asked in a cheesy Rocky Balboa impersonation.

 

XXX

 

            Suddenly Hyena rolled onto his stomach and grabbed two of his knives that were stuck into the ground. The turned into silver blurs as he hurled them at Sling.

Sling gasped and was about to throw a punch and knock them out of the air, but something yellow and white sped out from behind a stack of oil drums and swatted the weapons aside. “Oh no,” Hyena managed to groan and laugh at the same time.

            It was a cheetah-faced man in a white tank top and pants, wearing a black belt that showed a black baobab tree on yellow background for the buckle. He had a read bandana tied around his head and twirled a pair of long wooden clubs in his hands.

            “What’s the matter, sub?” the cheetahman laughed at Hyena, talking in a high, slightly nasal voice.

            “…who in the hell are you supposed to be?” Kamen Rider Sling demanded.

            The cheetahman laughed over his shoulder. “Name’s Aries. Who are _you_ supposed to be? Bravoman?”

            Hyena snarled as he got to his feet and flashed a knife in each hand. He threw one at each of his new enemies, Aries batting it out of the way with his club, and Sling’s arm stretched and slapped the other out of the way.

            Aries rushed Hyena, swinging his clubs back and forth through the air and yelling, “LIVIN’ LARGE!!”

            Sling could only stare at the cheetahman’s back for a second in disbelief, then ran after him, throwing a stretching punch at their shared enemy.

 

XXX

 

**And now…the Cheetahmen.**

**Ah, this has been a trip. The rest promises to be crazy too.**

**Couple of notes. I realize the name of the Bravoman Gashat isn’t the real translation of the game’s name, just throwing a little shout out to the cartoon based on it from a few years ago.**

**As for the Cheetahmen, I’d considered the Kamen Riders having Gashats based on the three of them to be able to fight in the broken game environments of Action 52, but eventually decided it was way more in the spirit of ficcing to have the Riders meet up with them instead.**

**Incidentally, that video review of the comic book that came with Action 52 about the Cheetahmen is really, it was done by Bobsheaux. Last I looked it was still up. Because that didn’t really give them much personality, though, the way they act and talk is based on that commercial for the game. Last I checked that was still up on youtube too.**

**Also, in the spirit of cost-cutting in actual tokusatsu, I imagined Utsura’s new dragon armor as looking like the Drago Knight Hunter Z suit painted blue and with bigger wings. ^^**

**Hopefully the story isn’t TOO bulky, but at least I’m having a little fun with it… =)**


	2. Chapter 2

            All Utsura could do was stare up at the cheetah-faced man standing over him.

            “Who are you?” he finally managed to ask.

            “I told you, Apollo,” replied the Cheetahman.

            “No, that’s not what I mean!” Utsura recovered enough to exclaim. “I mean, why are you fighting _him_??” He pointed up into the sky where Scavenger, the vulture mutant who’d been trying to choke him a minute before, was circling back at them.

            Apollo raised his crossbow, but it was over Utsura’s head, tracking Scavenger through the sky. “Because, dear chap, I took you for a Kamen Rider. A champion of the people, one who stands against the legions of darkness, like my brothers and I.”

            Utsura clutched his head. “…you mean you’re a _good guy_?” A Game Area that created heroes? Since when? The power of the Rider Gashats could only be used positively by a Kamen Rider. At least that was how it had always been up before.

            The Cheetahman suddenly pulled the trigger on his crossbow. Its string snapped and catapulted its shot over Utsura’s head to strike Scavenger right in the chest. He screeched and spun downward, and Utsura shook his head. Convenient or not, now was the time to strike.

            His armor’s wings sprang out and he took off, his eyes zeroing in on where Scavenger was going down. As he flew, the Rider saw Apollo running through the forest below, following almost straight behind him.

            But Scavenger beat his wings hard enough to push the trees in front of him forward with the force of the air, steadying him before he crashed into the ground. Just as soon as he recovered Utsura was coming up fast in front of him. Scavenger flew right at him with talons lowered to slash his opponent.

            The vulture mutant didn’t have one advantage that Utsura did, though. His dragon-faced gauntlets glowed and shot off twin blasts of fire that rammed into Scavenger, just before a shining bolt shot up from the ground too hitting him from the other side.

            Utsura glanced down to see Apollo shooting him a thumbs-up and an expression that seemed like a smirk.

            Maybe he had more than one advantage that Scavenger didn’t have.

            His hand shaking a little, Utsura charged up a finisher. “ **Spirit Critical FINISH!** ” it shouted. This made the middle Utsura’s chunky shoulder armor flip open, revealing a blue dragon’s head on a long neck on each side of his own head. Then he flew in blindingly fast circles Scavenger, fire blasts blazing out from the dragon heads on Utsura’s shoulders and the main mask covering his head. He stopped in midair and let one fire barrage charge up, then launched a fire barrage bigger than the others put together, totally consuming Scavenger.

            “ **GAME CLEAR!** ” the voice of his Gamer Driver announced with the defeat of the vulture mutant.

            Spreading his wings Utsura went into a glide and landed near Apollo again. The cheetahman grinned a fangy grin, and clapped Utsura on the shoulder of his armor. “Not bad, old boy! We could’ve used you before!”

            “ _Who_ could’ve used me before?” Utsura asked, still a little guarded.

            “I’ll tell you all about it,” Apollo promised. “But first, I’d appreciate your help finding my brothers.”

 

XXX

 

            Meanwhile below ground, Rune tapped the A button on the Gamer Septa twice. It turned into the handle of a manual air pump with a long hose, Dig Dug’s signature weapon. He turned toward where White Rhino was struggling in the grip of a wrestling hold put on him by a faux-Italian cheetahman. They struggled up and down the tunnel, turning each other around as White Rhino tried to break free and Hercules fought to prevent that.

            And in failing to keep White Rhino still for even a few seconds, Rune didn’t have a clear shot for this form’s weapon.

            Suddenly White Rhino bellowed angrily and jabbed both elbows into Hercules’ sides. The cheetahman gasped and his powerful grip slipped for just a few seconds. Unfortunately those few seconds were enough for White Rhino to squirm free.

            The mutated behemoth turned around lowered his horn at Rune again, possibly seeing him as the easier opponent, freeing up his attention to focus on the real danger.

            Before he could charge, Rune threw the hose down the tunnel and it connected with White Rhino’s rock-hard chest.

            He desperately jammed down on the handle and a rush of air hissed angrily down the hose. As soon as it touched him White Rhino’s torso inflated like a balloon. He let out a yelp of surprise as he drifted a few inches off the ground, giving Hercules the chance to run over and grab him by the legs. “That’s a new one!” Hercules laughed as he swung the enraged mutant around as White Rhino flailed his arms, hitting nothing.

            “It’s a classic!” Rune countered.

            “ ‘Ey, you can call it anything you want long as it gets the job done!” the Cheetahman chuckled.

            Rune ignored the bantering and twisted the knob on the end of his pump’s handle. “ **Dig Critical Finish!** ” The pump’s sides bulged out as a massive puff of air formed inside. White Rhino looked down at it in horror.

            Then Rune shoved down on the handle.

            The air hose whined in protest as the huge puff of air squeezed down it, then up the curl into White Rhino. His whole body ballooned up, then in a burst of shiny blocks he was gone.

            And the tunnel was quiet. Hercules looked over the distance between himself and the young Kamen Rider. He was the first to break the silence, smiling playfully at Rune. “So! You heard about me? The Cheetahmen that famous?”

            “I…wouldn’t really say that,” Rune replied, not sure what the right answer _was_.

            But far from any reaction Rune might’ve been expecting, Hercules just shrugged. “Eeeeh. You’re pretty good though, for a human. Think you can help me find the others?”

            “I hope we can find anything,” Rune mumbled. “It’s getting to be an awful mess out there.”

           

XXX

 

            Hyena was slinking back, summoning more and more knives and throwing them as he cackled nervously, looking for an escape route.

            Aries had dropped to all fours and ran left and right, still clutching his long clubs in his hands and easily dodging his old enemy’s flashing blades.

            Kamen Rider Sling ran right next to him, his armor’s external legs stretching out for him to take ten-foot-long strides. As they got close enough Sling threw two punches at once, both arms clacking as they extended out with balled fists aimed at Hyena’s jaw. At the same time Aries pounced, jabbing his long clubs out at Hyena’s chest.

            All four blows connected at the same time, his cackling call stopped by a cross between a gasp and a gulp as the impact landed. The knives he’d been about to throw were sent spinning away in crazy directions, dinging off the metal framework of the building under construction.

            Sling reached down and pulled the trigger on the gun peripheral holstered in his belt. “ **BERABOH Critical Finish!** ” As he readied himself to attack Aries ran behind Hyena. His right fist extended out and punched Hyena, then this left, then his right, over and over, faster and faster with the chorus of “ **BERABOH** ”s coming quicker until they were just a storm of garbled noise.

            At the same time Aries was drumming on Hyena from behind with his clubs. In a few seconds he was keeping pace with Sling’s strikes. Finally Sling’s arms snapped back into place and he shoved his head forward, the helmet extending off and crashing into Hyena at high speed.

Hyena popped, scattering shiny blocks all over the battlefield, a last echoing moan of, “It was bad enough when there was just three of you…”

            “There still are,” Aries said, panting from the furious attack. He tucked his hair back under his headband and then looked over at Sling. The Rider said nothing, waiting for him to make the first move. “Hey,” Aries said then, “you up for kicking some more butt today?”

            “Who? Yours?” Sling asked. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

            “Aww, man!” Aries said, clutching his head as he shook it from side to side in dismay. “Tell you what, we’ll find _your_ friends first, huh?”

            “What makes you think I’ve got any?” Sling asked slowly. Testing.

            Aries grinned. At least, that’s what Sling thought it was. He’d never thought that much about what cats smiling looked like.

            “Because every game’s more fun with more players!” the Cheetahman laughed.

 

XXX

 

            Utsura closed his hand around the new Gashat and pulled it out, still wondering if it was the smart move. Instead of the usual “GASHUUUN” sigh the Driver announced, “ **Thank you very much for being with us.** ”

            The Game Area peeled away around them revealing the ordinary rundown street Kuroto Dan’s old hideout had been on. As it cleared Kensei noticed he wasn’t the only one who’d found an unexpected new ally; Yoshoku and Doku had a cheetah wearing white next to them too.

            “Does anyone know what’s going on?” Kensei asked.

            “Well these are the Cheetahmen!” Doku replied. “They’re the heroes of the game collection.”

            Kensehi rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I meant why are the games making good guys? When has that _ever_ happened before? With us or with the other Riders?”

            Yoshoku looked at Doku, who looked at Hercules, who looked at Aries, who smirked and shrugged. “Well,” Doku finally said, “is having more good guys such a bad thing?”

            “I’m just trying to understand what we’re up against,” Kensei said. As he did he spotted a dark shape over Apollo’s shoulder. There was the grey, dirty version of Yuuma giving him a despairing look out of his dark, sunken eyes. Kensei started to raise his hand to reach out for his brother but by then Yuuma was gone.

            “Hidenaga? You all right?...Hidenaga!”

            Kensei snapped around, about to shove his Gashat into his belt. Everyone else jumped back in surprise, except Aries who growled low in this throat and leaned forward to brandish his clubs. Scratching his scalp in confusion, Kensei fumbled for an answer. Did he really see that, or was missing his brother weighing on his mind? But he looked up and saw something that took his mind off those questions.

            Over their heads was a glowing, shifting mass of shining blocks. Every few seconds a monstrous face would form out of one side: White Rhino’s, then Hyena’s out of another side, then it split apart and one side reformed into Scavenger letting out a silent scream. Then it all turned into a bright white stream that flowed away through the air to the top of a building made of piles of shiny black blocks.

 

XXX

 

            And in his vantage point in the top room of the alien skyscraper, Doctor Morbis held out a dark purple device shaped like a wide octagon with a small screen in the middle and a colorful button on each side. A lavender B button was on the farther side near where a cartridge slot stuck out near two red prongs, and a dark red A button on the other side of the screen.

            A Bugvisor.

            The stream of whirling blocks from outside flowed into a pair of prongs on the side near the cartridge slot, and as the last of the stream disappeared the screen lit up with an image of Scavenger, White Rhino and Hyena, standing up but heads bowed as if sleeping.

            “You failed, my Sub-Species,” he sighed. “Failed miserably, but I should’ve expected it. The Cheetahmen were bound to manifest too…but your power will not be wasted.”

            The doctor plugged the Bugvisor into the front of his belt. Then he held up the transparent Action 52 Gashat and put it into the Bugvisor’s slot. The device shook and hissed angrily as the Gashat’s half-finished but awesome power sparked inside it. A minute later the floor rumbled. Doctor Morbis did nothing as the top of the building separated from the rest.

            The huge black blocks making up the building tumbled off each other like dominoes. When they touched the ground the dirt sank down and then covered them. The box on the top floated in the sky for a few minutes, then dropped into the ground and disappeared like the rest.

 

XXX

 

            “What in the hell was that?” Doku demanded, the first of the Riders to recover his voice. The sky was still buzzing faintly as poorly-designed spaceships, bats and alien creatures flew around, but the blocky skyscraper had completely disappeared into the ground.

            “ ‘ey, either of you smell the Doctor behind this?” Hercules grunted.

            “It’s the obvious conclusion, dear chap,” Apollo answered. He turned to look over at his brothers, whose tails flicked side to side faster. “We’re dealing with something much stranger than we’re used to, though.”

            Aries fidgeted, shifting from one foot to the other and twirling one club before twirling the other one. “You sure about that, Paul?”

            As they talked Yoshoku pulled Doku aside. “Let’s go make sure the girls are okay before we figure out what we’re doing next,” Yoshoku said. Then he whispered, “And who we’re bringing with us.”

            “What are you talking about?” Doku whispered back.

            Yoshoku grimaced. “What are _you_ talking about? Those guys are from that game that’s screwing everything up, right? Since when has video game characters coming to life been anything but trouble? We shouldn’t trust these guys, let’s grab Hidenaga and go.”

            “Oh, you trust _him_ now?”

            The question made Yoshoku scowl. “Let’s just get him and go. Don’t we have enough problems already?”

            He stalked away, past Doku, past Kensei as he walked up to see what was going on. “He thinks we should ditch the Cheetahmen,” Doku quietly reported.

            Kensei scratched the back of his head and sighed quietly, but nodded. “His mom was the only person he was close to, right? I guess I don’t blame him for still being mad at living game characters,” he answered.

            He went around the corner of the building with Doku following behind him. Something moved in a shadow behind a stack of oil drums, but then a figure leaned out and sighed in relief. “Kensei-kun, there you are!” Kiiko said and stood up in her torn burger joint uniform. Next to her was Perri, who grinned.

            “I say, chaps,” Apollo said behind him, so suddenly Kensei almost screamed. “We’ve no time to waste. Doctor Morbis’ headquarters must have been in that building that just fell apart, and if he did that he must be up to something _big_. If I know him, he moved it underground to keep us from reaching him, and that means we need to move quickly.”

            Doku cleared his throat. With everyone looking his way, he asked, “What does Doctor Morbis want, anyway? The comic was kind of vague on that.”

            Aries squinted at him in confusion. “Comic?”

            But Apollo waved off the point. “He wants to become complete. Real. The more time it takes, the more things run out of his control.”

            Yoshoku raised the obvious point. “So, any sense in trying to just wait him out?”

            “Of course not,” Kensei answered forcefully. He waved his hand at the sky with clusters of spaceships and monster zipping back and forth above. Now though, dogfights had broken out between some. One ship took a hit to the rear and spiraled down to crash into the side of a building. A blue dragon and a red one weaved back and forth through the sky, shooting fireballs at each other as they were spurred on by the knights on their backs. White things just barely recognizable as cartoon ghosts slithered out of the vents on a manhole cover. “It’s getting worse. We can’t wait for this to just blow over by itself,” Kensei went on.

            The grim look on his face made Yoshoku step back in surprise, but then the ghost of a smile appeared on his face. He turned to look at Kiiko and Perri next. “What about them?”

            “I’m coming too!” Perri immediately exclaimed.

            Hercules and Apollo knelt down next to her. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. Where we need to go is much too dangerous.”

            “ ’e knows what he’s talking about,” Hercules added. “Apollo’s the smartest guy I ever met.”

            “How many people _have_ you met?” Aries teased his muscular brother.

            Perri stared up at both Cheetahmen, her cheeks puffing out in annoyance. And as she did her body started glowing softly. Small transparent blocks formed around her body and drifted away as she did. Doku stepped over and looked Perri in the eye. “Perri, if you want to come with us, you have to tell us how you know Kuroto Dan and where you came from.”

            She looked up at him for a minute before she said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember much before I woke up the other day, with Kuro-san telling me that Doctor Morbis and the Sub-Species were coming for me.”

            “Kiiko,” Kensei whispered to his friend. “Can you get anything off her?”

            She shut her eyes for a few seconds and focused on Perri. “There’s definitely power with her. It feels like the power around here, but less…incomplete, I guess. I can feel where the source of that power is coming from.” Kiiko pointed, a glowing arrow in front of her finger as it always did when she was leading him to a Gashat.

            “Then maybe we need to take her,” Kensei admitted. “I don’t know how this works, but maybe she has some kind of power we need to fix everything, and what if there’s something down there that only all of us can handle together?”

            “Loathe as I am to admit it, you may be right, old chap,” Apollo said. “Doctor Morbis is a clever one, and he’s playing with more power than he ever has before!”

            Perri smiled  up at Kensei, and Doku squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll be in charge of keeping her safe.” He thumped his chest. “Count on me.”

            “Then let’s get going,” Yoshoku said, walking past them toward where the black skyscraper had disappeared.

 

XXX

 

            As they went, the Cheetahmen split off from the rest of the group, to be less obvious as targets in case they were spotted, Aries had explained.

            Doku kept one hand on Perri’s shoulder and in the other he carried his Gamer Septa, ready at a moment’s notice.

            “Tell me about you all beat the bad guys!” Perri smiled. “I want to hear how the Sub-Species lost!”

            “Why don’t you ask him?” Kiiko said, turning Perri to face Kensei’s back. “I’m sure he’s got the most exciting story, right Kensei-kun?” she said, and Yoshoku and Doku rolled their eyes.

            But while Kensei walked he glanced down at his feet, sure he’d seen his shadow move. His stomach clenched for a second as he expected it to come to life and attack him like one of the enemies he’d fought when all this started. What he saw was something worse. The shadow’s head morphed into the ashy-skinned parody of his brother’s face that he thought he’d been seeing all day long.

            “Tell her all about it,” Yuuma said, the voice no long dry and hollow, but deep and mocking. “Tell about how you lost your focus in the middle of a fight and an overgrown cat had to save your bacon. Even with the most straightforward powers, you almost lost when those two morons you hang out with had no problems at all. She’s right, your story _would have_ to be the best!”

            “You’re not my brother,” Kensei hissed.

            “And you’re not the hero he was hoping for, are you? You only survived as long as you have because he was the one you were really fighting the whole time. Now that you’re fighting real enemies, how long do you think you’ll last? Today would’ve been your last day…” the dark face smiled.

            A hand tapped him on the shoulder and Kensei whipped around, his face gaping in surprise. Kiiko stared at him for a few seconds before she asked, “What’s wrong, Kensei? You were mumbling to yourself.”

            He looked away. “It’s nothing. We better hurry so the Cheetahmen don’t beat us there.”

            “That’s a bet I wouldn’t take,” Doku said.

            Perri looked at him questioningly. “Why not?”

            “Because they’re cheetahs,” Doku replied, looking surprised that he’d actually had to answer. “Cheetahs are fast,” he explained.

            Her face was blank for a minute before a light seem to go on behind her eyes. “Ooooooooooooh! They are, right!...I never really realized that about them.”

            Yoshoku chuckled. “Fast? No they aren’t. Who’d make a game about cheetahs who aren’t fast?”

            Doku shrugged. “I think they were just a ripoff of those ninja turtle things.”

            “…ninja turtles?” Yoshoku stared, rolling the words around. “That’s even stupider than slow cheetahs!”

            Kiiko came over to Kensei, but he was silent. And by then they’d walked past all the colorful sombreros covering the street, and were just at the edge of the perfect square where the black skyscraper disappeared.

            Huge rectangular holes were cut into the ground all over the area. Surprisingly they didn’t go straight down, but instead they had ramps leading down into dimly lit tunnels. The Cheetahmen approached from the other side of the empty area, splitting up and walking down the paths around the holes by themselves.

            “Which one do we try?” Doku ask. “Do you guys have any idea?”

            Apollo shook his head. “These could go anywhere. There’s no telling which is the quickest way, or which is the most dangerous.”

            “Why bother picking at random? We’ll come to you!” interrupted a nasal voice followed by a laugh. Everyone looked in that direction, and coming out of one of the openings was a hunched man wearing a yellow and green apron. One arm was missing, and a robotic one was attached to his shoulder instead.

            Aries laughed as he recognized him. “Morbis sent _you_ , Cygore?! Is he _that_ desperate?”

            But Cygore smirked back. “Who, me? I’m just the walker.”

            “What does that mean?” Aries snorted. But then he got his answer.

            Coming out of the same opening that Cygore emerged from was a gigantic ape. He was nearly twelve feet high at the shoulder, and almost as wide across. His powerful arms, as thick as tree trunks, were restrained by giant metal chains fastened together, and then up to a collar around his neck. Cygore’s robot claw split back and a thin rod with a series of indentations on the end popped out. He stuck it into the point where the chains met, and they dropped off with a pop.

            “Say hello to the Ape-Man, boys,” Cygore sneered and stepped back.

            As soon as he did the ape pounded his chest with both of his massive fists, bellowing so loud the Riders and Cheetahmen were blown off their feet, and the two dragon-riding warriors they’d seen a minute before were pushed out of sight in opposite directions. A few mismatched spaceships above stopped suddenly, quivering from the force of Ape-Man’s yell, before they exploded, showering the ground with shiny blocks.

            As one the young Riders hit the triggers of their new Rider Gashats and in a flash they’d transformed once again. They circled around to the left of the huge ape while the Cheetahmen went to the right, Apollo scanning the huge mutant with his predator’s eyes for a place where a well-placed shot might bring down the Ape-Man.

            Then the Ape-Man lifted his arms high over his head, blocking out the sun, and with incredible speed brought them down on the ground around him.

            It was like an earthquake had hit the block. The Cheetahmen went tumbling like acrobats off the ground, and Sling and Rune were knocked sliding away by the ground erupting in broken cracks. The wings on Utsura’s armor snapped open and he rode the wave of awesome force high above the ground, then hurried to steady himself and fire back. He pushed the x10 button on the back of his Mighty Hand, hesitating for a second and wondering if his body could take the strain.

            The air around Utsura turned orange from the heat of the Utsura’s blast, a massive column of fire ripping through the air. It came down like a spear, and hit the Ape-Man’s chest like a wrecking ball. He staggered, his long toes splaying as he absorbed the impact. The flame dispersed.

            And Ape-Man just grunted, the fur over his head and chest slightly singed. He shoved his hands into the cracked ground, ripped out a hunk of rock as tall as he was, and threw it at Utsura.

            A strangled gasp came from Utsura’s throat as he saw the giant rock coming his way. He charged his other gauntlet and sent a shot dropping like a bomb down at it. They crashed into each other and both disappeared in a blaze of light and angry roar of sound.

            The huge mutant grunted in annoyance at his attack not working. A second later there was a TWANG and a slender projectile hit him on the side of the neck, a shot from Apollo’s crossbow. Sling’s arms reached out and smacked into his jaw knocking Ape-Man off-balance, giving Hercules an opening to take a running start and launch himself Ape-Man, tackling the behemoth and knocking him off his feet.

            Immediately the Ape-Man recovered and pushed himself into a sitting position with an angry grunt. But then he found himself under a full-scale assault from the Kamen Riders and Cheetahmen. Aries jumped up Ape-Man’s arm and battered the side of his head while the giant primate was distracted swatting away Rune throwing the hose of his pump. Apollo and Utsura moved in quick circles around him, peppering him with their weapons. Sling threw stretching punches with one arm then the other while Hercules tried to use all of his great strength to pin their enemy’s shoulders.

            Ape-Man struggled and growled as his enemies swarmed him, planting his hands in preparation for a charge. He didn’t notice that Apollo had disappeared, and the Cheetahmen’s leader offered up a quiet but intense prayer as he crouched behind the chimney of a small pueblo.

            “Mother, you gave your life trying to save us from the Doctor,” he breathed. “If you can hear me, give me your strength now to save my brothers and our new friends.”

            He aimed his crossbow, then fired. Just before it hit the Ape-Man between the shoulders, Apollo was sure he’d seen a yellow and black glow surround his shot. The huge mutant let out a high-pitched yell of surprise and fell forward, landing face-down in the dirt.

            And then before he could recover his enemies were all over him. Hercules jumped into the air, planted one foot on top of a floating teddy bear, then jumped off and aimed himself to come down fists-first right in the middle of the giant mutant’s back. Aries ran up as the Ape-Man swung a giant arm trying to strike his opponents with a scything attack, and letting out a piercing “HI-YAH!” landed a chopping blow on a pressure point right where the forearm met the elbow. The giant swinging arm stopped and dropped to the ground, totally limp. Ape-Man himself started to scream but Aries turned and pounded him right between the eyes with both clubs at once.

            “I’ll set him up, then you guys hit him!” Sling said and stepped forward, his arms stretching out to the maximum length and grabbing Ape-Man’s shoulders. Then his legs extended up high as he leaned forward at a sharp angle, pulling Ape-Man’s gigantic body off the ground. Sling’s legs arced further and further forward, dragging the stunned mutant up until he was sitting up. Then Sling, who was directly over his head, retracted his legs and fell over the Ape-Man’s shoulders. The huge primate started to fall under his massive weight and Sling extended his arms out to catch his shoulders, then his legs snapped out, his boots digging into the trunk of a pixelated tree to brace himself.

            “Now, Hidenaga!” Sling barked. His suit’s arms were creaking and being pushed back down on him by the huge mutant’s weight. Utsura circled around and his hand moved to the lever of his Gamer Driver to charge his finishing attack.

            Then in the Ape-Man’s enormous shadow he saw the zombie-like Yuuma step out, locking blood-red eyes with Utsura. He wasn’t alone, with a man and a woman with the same frightening grey skin and red eyes that Utsura recognized after a few year-long seconds as his mother and father.

            And the Rider froze.

            Then in that lapse Ape-Man’s fist swung out at him.

            It was like watching a planet coming down at him.

 

XXX

 

            “What do we do?” Perri asked nervously as the Cheetahmen and Kamen Riders scattered, but were still blown head-over-heels by the incredible force of Ape-Man’s mad charge. “Man-Ape was never that strong in the game!”

            Kiiko wasn’t sure how to answer her. What _did_ they do if the rules of the game changed when it was brought to life? Hadn’t all their equipment been created with the assumption it wouldn’t be?

            She didn’t get to think about it for long, as suddenly Cygore appeared from out of one of the tunnels in the ground next to them and the metal pincer on his arm closed like a handcuff around Perri’s wrist.

            The young girl gasped in surprise, then screamed in terror. “LET ME GO!!”

            Cygore shook his head, sneering softly. “You had your chance to come nicely, Perri! The Doctor’s _insisting_ now!”

            Kiiko tried to tackle him but Cygore turned and a dart shot out of the side of his arm. As the tip lodged in her chest Kiiko’s vision was already darkening around the edges. She slid off the thin lab assistant and slumped on the ground, totally unconscious.

            “Let’s go, Perri,” Cygore ordered and tugged on her arm.

            “You can’t make me! They’ll stop you!”

            “No one’s _ever_ finished this game, Perri,” Cygore sneered. “You know that.”

            Then he dragged Perri into one of the tunnels as she kicked and fought the whole way.

 

XXX

 

            Utsura bounced out of the depression in the ground he’d made landing from Ape-Man’s punch and rolled six times before coming to a stop and his armor faded away. It was a few minutes before he’d recovered enough to look over to where the fight was building to a climax.

            The gorilla monster had recovered from their assault and grabbed Hercules, tossing the brawny Cheetahman away. While his attention was distracted Rune threw the hose of his air pump, hooking it to the monster’s side, then jammed down the handle and sent a massive rush of air out.

            Ape-Man grunted angrily but then stopped and gasped out loudly in surprise as his body puffed up, turning him into a hairy blimp. He whimpered once and then popped, flying shining blocks everywhere. Blocks a couple feet high, which crashed into the two Rider and Cheetahmen and knocked them sprawling.

            That wasn’t the only lasting effect from the Ape-Man’s demise. The pit-covered ground quaked underneath the stunned heroes. Then a web of cracks shot across the ground, joining with the spread of pits. There was one horrible creak like metal on metal before the entire plot of ground collapsed, taking all five of them with it. A huge hole in the ground was all that was left.

            Kensei staggered as he walked to the edge of the pit, still unsteady after taking Ape-Man’s awesome blow. He fell down onto his hands and knees as he stared into the bottomless black depths.

 

XXX

 

            As they fell through the void it turned from black to a bright green, and huge disembodied heads with fanged teeth and wearing giant sunglasses came circling past the group of dazed heroes.

            The bright light shining straight into his eyes roused Rune first, and as he saw the groaning, snarling heads rising up he almost let his weapon drop from his hand into the void. “Why aren’t they attacking?” he wondered out loud. “Aren’t these from that game, Non-Human? They kill you if you fall off the path…”

            “Maybe they’re just watching their buddies take us out,” Sling grunted. More inhuman shapes drifted up from the bottom of the shape. A tool chest on wheels came shooting up and Hercules smashed it to bits. A pink tank crawled through space, treads grinding away at nothing, before Rune flung his air hose out and it connected with the tank’s cannon. One press of the plunger and it inflated then burst into blocks.

            The dark shapes of more enemies formed below. Sling threw two punches at once, his gun yelling “ **BERABOH!** ” in stereo. His punches shattered something that looked like a teddy bear and a hair dryer the size of a bicycle.

            Rune squirmed in agony while they fell. “Look, I was trying to ignore that, but isn’t there some way you can turn stupid noise off?!” he bellowed.

            “ _You’re_ the one who’s into these games, you tell me!” Sling retorted. A shark came up and slapped him in the face with its tailfin. Then, amazingly, Spider-Man shot up next and punched Sling in the jaw on his way past.

            “Watch out!” Apollo yelled as a pair of windows came tumbling up next. A hairy hand stuck itself out of each, holding a purple cartoon bomb. The hands tossed the bombs up at the five of them, fuses sparking. Sling extended his arms just before the bombs exploded. It was the last thing they saw before they were all engulfed by darkness.

 

XXX

            “Oh my god,” he sobbed. “Everyone’s gone. Just…gone. All because I stopped for just a second…!”

            “Kensei-kun,” someone breathed a little way away from him. He looked over, almost expecting another game enemy even though they knew his name. But it was Kiiko, staggering over next to him before she fell on her butt. “What happened? I saw you get hit by that gorilla. Are you okay?”

            He shook his head. “I was supposed to finish him off, but I saw people next to him. My brother, and my parents. They looked like they should’ve been dead, but somehow they weren’t.”

            “But none of them are really dead, right? Your parents are fine, and your brother’s just stuck in that portal in the sky with all the other people until we get him back out again.”

            He sighed and crawled away from the edge of the hole before he managed to stand up and walk away from the edge. Kiiko followed him, her expression a mix of confusion and worry. With her usual bluntness, she asked, “Kensei, what happened?”

            “I don’t know!” he said and clutched his head. “My mom told me this morning the anniversary of when Yuuma saved that kid from a Bugster’s coming up. All day, whenever we get into a fight I’ve been seeing this zombie version of Yuuma, and I just choke up.”

            “Why?” Kiiko asked, a little surprising with how gentle she sounded. “Your brother chose you to be Kamen Rider Utsura. We met him and he told you that, right?”

            Kensei leaned against the wall of a wrecked building with one arm, staring hard at the ground. “I’ve just been thinking about him since I remembered that, Kiiko. I mean…he’s everything I always wanted to be. He was the star of the baseball team, he had so many girls who wanted to go out with him he had to put on a disguise to leave school sometimes! He even made time to help me start learning kendo. If Yuuma was here to be Kamen Rider Utsura, we’d have to be a lot farther along than we are with me here.”

            Kiiko put her hand on her friend’s shoulder, then pulled him away from the wall and turned him around.

            Then she slapped him.

            He stumbled back away from her, clutching his cheek in shock. Kiiko stared him down, arms folded across her chest. “You know what the difference is between you and your brother?” she demanded.

            “…what?” Kensei replied, more in response to what just happened than the question itself.

            “The difference between your brother and you is he fought in one battle, and he lost,” Kiiko said. “You’ve fought in a lot and you’re still fighting.”

            “Kiiko, that’s—”

            She went on like she hadn’t heard him starting to talk. “You love your brother, that’s great, but your brother did more than love you. He trusted you to do this, and you’re doing better than he is.”

            Not answering, Kensei looked away again. She reached out and cupped his chin and he flinched away after what she’d just done. But Kiiko walked around to face him, smiling gently but encouragingly. “Look, the hero’s allowed to have a moment of doubt sometimes. But he has to realize how much people are counting on him and deal with his problem.”

            “It’s not that simple, Kiiko,” Kensei sighed.  
            “Why isn’t it?” she immediately replied.

            He looked her in the eye, and her return gaze was gentle and curious, not accusing. He was about to tell Kiiko that real life wasn’t like a video game script, but suddenly stopped and asked himself why it couldn’t be. Hadn’t it been kind of like that with the old Kamen Riders? Enemies turning out to be friends in the end, saving the day at the last minute time and time again?

            She just looked at him, for once patiently waiting for his answer to the question. Ver her shouder, Kensei saw the zombie version of his brother appear out of a shadow. They locked eyes for a minute, Yuuma’s face despairing at first then looking confused as Kensei just looked back at him, then down at the Gamer Driver in his hands. Then he turned and looked the other way. He expected to see his zombie brother appearing in front of him again, but there was no sign of him in the crater-covered green lunar landscape in front of him.

            “Kensei-kun, are you okay? I didn’t like slapping you, that’s just what the hero’s friend always does when he gets depressed and can’t save the world anymore…” Kiiko said apologetically.

            He turned around and Kiiko yelped in surprise from how suddenly it happened. She was only a little reassured by the slight smile on his face.

            “Kiiko,” he said, “thanks.”

            “…so you’re okay I slapped you?

            “ ‘Okay’ is kind of a strong word for it,” he chuckled.

            “But you’re not mad,” she asserted.

            Kensei laughed and shook his head. “No,” he answered. “But we really need to hurry. The others need us.”

            Kiiko nodded. “You’re right. It’s not like the sidekicks are good for anything without the hero.”

            He looked back over his shoulder at her once, then started walking back.

 

XXX

 

            When the wall slid back and Cygore dragged her into a large cave-like room lit by an evil green light, the fight seemed to go out of Perri. He flung her out and she groaned as she skinned her knees on the rough concrete floor.

            The only room was almost totally empty except for the basic metal desk with a pair of flat computer monitors resting on it, behind an arrowhead-shaped device that would’ve fit in one hand. It would seem the Doctor didn’t believe in indulging himself even in his own little inner sanctum. One wall was taken up completely by a long glass window, and standing in front of it was a bearded man wearing a green jumpsuit with yellow shoulders.

            “I got her, Doctor!” Cygore proclaimed proudly.

            “And it’s only taken all the day and the demise of all the Sub-Species to make it happen,” the other man replied. “You’ve been a very naughty girl, Perri,” he said as he turned to face her.

            “You’ve been a very naughty grownup,” she spat back. “ _Doctor Morbis._ ”

            He looked down at her with no expression at all, arms clasped behind his back. After a minute of no reaction from his icy stare, Doctor Morbis said, “I know you have one of those idiotic games that give those children their powers. Give it to me now.”

            “No.”

            In a heartbeat Doctor Morbis was right in front of her, grabbing her forearm in a grip like steel and twisting it sharply to one side. “I won’t ask you again, Perri.”

            Cygore winced at the display and looked away as hard as he could. Shrieking in pain Perri slid her hand out from under her shirt, holding a Rider Gashat but an unusual-looking one. It was twice as wide as the thin ones normally used by the New GENM Riders, with a pair of grey panels sticking out of the case in place of the usual clear circuit panels. Sticking out from the side of the case was part of a yellow wheel, and on the surface that was sticking out could be seen a few characters from GENM games: the round pink shape of Mighty the platform mascot, the bearded face of the Brave Knight of Taddle Quest, the spiked helmet of the rider from Bakusou Bike.

            Then Perri did something totally unexpected. She pressed the strange Gashat against her body and without warning it sank into her skin, with shiny pixel shapes parting on the surface of her shirt to make room as she pushed the Gashat into herself. Within seconds it had disappeared and there was sign of the weird distortion Perri created on herself.

            She smirked up at Doctor Morbis. “If you want to destroy it, you have to destroy me,” she breathed. “And you won’t do that, will you?”

            He clenched his teeth in rage. Then he twisted Perri’s arm behind her back and she screamed in pain. “You underestimate me little girl,” he whispered, the color quickly fading from his face from rage. “I orchestrated all this, it’s only a matter of time before you bring us all the way to life…”

            “But the longer you wait, the harder it gets!” Perri grunted. “And the longer you wait, the stronger your enemies get!”

            When he heard that, Doctor Morbis threw back his head and laughed so loud her ears rang. “Oh, you’re talking about the Cheetahmen, I suppose! And those Kamen Riders who joined forces with them! Look down there!” he roared, swinging Perri by her arm toward the long window.

            She saw that it looked down into a room on a lower level, a room lined with tall glass tubes. And she gasped as she made out Apollo slumped against the back of one tube in the corner. In the tube next to him was Kamen Rider Sling, then Hercules, then Aries, then Kamen Rider Rune.

            “In a matter of minutes I’ll have their data like I have the Sub-Species’. Your newer heroes,” Doctor Morbis laughed again, “might survive the extraction, but the Cheetahmen are finally about to meet their end.” Even as he said it, the feline warrior’s shapes were becoming less distinct. Tiny black and yellow blocks floated away from their bodies. Small block shapes were drifting away from their Gashats too.

            Perri chewed her lip, trying to look nervous, but it wasn’t something she’d need a lot of help with. The only bit of hope she could cling to was that she’d kept the Doctor from getting the one thing he might be worried about. But if there was no-one to use it soon, the whole world would be in trouble…

 

XXX

 

            Yet again Utsura’s gauntlets blazed before fireballs obliterated a coil of growling spaghetti noodles and a man-sized hammer waving itself back and forth, as the screaming green heads whirled by them.

            “This isn’t really the way I would’ve picked!” Kiiko screamed as she held onto Utsura’s neck.

            “You said the objective was done the hole!”

            “I also said there was probably another way there!”

            “But is it a _faster_ way?” Utsura asked, then yelled in surprise from a giant hairbrush from nowhere crashing into the tip of one of his wings and breaking the tip off. He stared straight ahead after that. The wings were showing a collection of dents, gouges and scorched blemishes already, and if he let anything else get by him they were doomed.

            A pair of chattering teeth spiraled out of the green void and were blown to blocky smithereens by a fireball Utsura’s gauntlet. As soon as he flew through it, the green light seeping up from below suddenly seemed to flare and instead of flying down a hole, he found himself in a huge cavern-like chamber, and covering the bottom was a giant orb of pure green light.

            Kiiko gagged and then Utsura could hear her puking over his shoulder. He leveled out and circled the top of the glowing space. “Close your eyes, just point which way we should go,” he tried to advise her. While Kiiko was recovering enough to point the way to where they need to go, Utsura kept his oversized eyes on the ball of light below, and noticed tiny black shapes floating around it in circles.

            Straining his vision he saw that they displayed pictures, and the pictures were moving. On one a baby’s pacifier shot down a smiling teddy bear and something Utsura seemed to remember was the American letter A. Another showed a man with gigantic feet jumping over tacks, while more than he could count without being overwhelmed showed spaceships blazing away at generic alien craft. Another one showed an eskimo climbing through an ice maze. Utsura realized they were screens showing all of the different games from Action 52; that this glowing thing was somehow the concentration of all the chaotic, broken power his enemies had been wielding.

            “There!” Kiiko said, stabbing the air with her finger over his shoulder. He followed it with his eyes, and in middle of the blinding lightshow he spotted a short, wide window floating above him.

            And in that window he saw Perri banging on the glass with her fists. Two men dressed in green and yellow were grabbing her wrists and trying to pull her away.

            “Hold on,” Utsura warned. Kiiko yipped in alarm as she realized what he was about to do and buried her face between his shoulders.

            Then Utsura crashed through the window at top speed.

 

XXX

 

            As soon as Doctor Morbis realized what was happening he made a strangled gasp of panic, let go of Perri’s arm and ran over to his desk. He grabbed the Bugvisor off it just as the window exploded into a rain of knives. Cygore whimpered in fear and ducked to avoid the glass shards peppering the room, but Morbis calmly slotted the Action 52 Gashat and locked the Bugvisor into his belt.

            “You’ve gone far enough, you psycho,” Utsura growled as he landed.

Morbis chuckled. “You look totally convincing saying that, with that pimple-faced girl in a beat-up burger joint uniform hanging off your neck!”

            “I _don’t_ have pimples!” Kiiko snapped.

            “Go make sure Perri’s okay,” Utsura said and turned back to Doctor Morbis. “As for you—”

            The mad scientist pressed the trigger on his transparent Gashat. “Yes, as for me!” The Bugvisor quivered and yelled a distorted, “ **BUGGLE UP!** ” The small monitor on the device flicked on with an image of Scavenger the vultureman. Morbis spread his arms wide and the tips of thick grey feathers pushed themselves into sight. His nose extended until it became a sharp-looking beak. Then his boots stretched and tore, showing his feet had changed to scaled talons.

            Utsura looked at him silently for a second. “Your freak friends lost, you know.”

            “My freak friends couldn’t do this,” Morbis replied. Suddenly a ring of icons showing different landscapes appeared around him, like the Kamen Riders themselves when they were selecting a Game Area. He hit one showing a darkened sky above an overgrown forest and the room where they were standing peeled away until it had been totally replaced by the same star-filled sky.

            Then Morbis was diveboming him.

 

XXX

 

            “I’m okay, really!” Perri insisted as she pushed herself across the floor, then her finger brushed the point of a shard of glass and she yelped.

            “Knock it off. I’m not going to bite you,” Kiiko said.

            “You’re scary,” Perri retorted and pointed over Kiiko’s shoulder. “And aren’t you going to do anything about him??”

            Sighing in exhaustion, Kiiko turned around to face Cygore as he hid in a corner. He’d unlocked the metal pincer on his robot arm and dropped it floor. As he noticed Kiiko looking back at him he fumbled to attach a buzzsaw in its place then dropped it on his foot and yowled in pain. Kiiko narrowed her eyes at him, and Cygore immediately fell on his knees.

            “Doctor Morbis made me do it, okay?” he whined.

            Kiiko walked over to him in one intimidating stride, then grabbed him by his nose and twisted. He moaned and tried to pull away but she only twisted it harder. Kiiko snuck farther away from Kiiko while the bigger girl’s back was turned.

            “Where are the others?” Kiiko demanded. Cygore groaned through his nose but pointed at a wide window with the end of his robot arm.

He asked, “Now you’ll let me go, right? It wasn’t my fault…”

She didn’t. Instead she dragged him over to the window, to look down into a white room full of large glass tubes. In two of them she could see Doku Dasao and Yoshoku Kasgu, unconscious but intact.

The other tubes were empty.

 

XXX

 

            Knowing he only had a split-second to brace himself, Utsura spread his armor’s battered wings wide and held his fists together in front of his chest, shooting off a fireball that collided with Morbis when he was barely a foot away. The mutated scientist screeched like the bird he’d become and flew upward. Utsura went after him, peppering the sky with a rapid stream of fiery shots while Morbis dove and weaved through the sky.

            An echoing roar carried across the sky as a red dragon with a knight in black armor on its back flew at Utsura, a blue dragon with a knight in bright silver on its back right behind it. The red dragon out in front spotted Utsura and its feral mind apparently recognized a threat, as it spat a fireball as tall as a man at him.

            Utsura swooped around it, singing the tip of his wing, and dropped a bomb from one gauntlet at the dragon before it could attack him again. The huge neon HIT graphic that covered it took up Utsura’s concentration just a second too long and Morbis crashed into him from behind, huge vulture talons grabbing and tearing at the wings on back. There was a terrible metal shriek and then Utsura was falling.

            The ground turned into a dizzying carpet of green circles and brown streaks as Utsura fell faster until he hit something, the wind knocked out of him, and he found himself tangled in the branches of a tree. Through the leaves he could already see the dark shape of the mutated doctor coming after him again and twisted his body to drop to the ground. He charged up an attack as Morbis closed in to finish the job then when the killer talons were only a few feet from his face Utsura whipped his arm out. A pillar of fire swept out and covered Morbis from wing to wing.

            Completely covered in a sheet of fire, he came down looking like a meteor. He plowed into the trunk of a tree and snapped it in half, then the tree behind it and brought that down on top of him too.

            Utsura slumped against a tree and took a loud breath. Even if he was up for being a hero, that had been, what…his fifth fight in one day? He managed to find the strength to turn and try to see if Morbis had recovered, then gasped and ducked as one of the smashed tree trunks came flying at his head like a spear.

            When he managed to get off the ground Utsura saw a new hulking mutant, with the body of a gorilla and the head of a white rhinoceros. “Morbis?!” the Rider gasped.

            The ape-rhino mutant flexed a bicep and laughed. “You’re honestly surprised!” he laughed in a roughened turn on Morbis’s voice. Suddenly he jumped into the air and came down right in front of Utsura.

            The exhausted young hero ducked under one huge fist but then another rocketed out and crashed straight into his chest. He flew away faster than when he still had wings, but Morbis grabbed him by the legs in midair. Holding him off the ground, Morbis punched him again in the face and Utsura’s armor started to flicker.

            “Feel a little proud of yourself,” Morbis snickered. “You and your friends have been more of an annoyance than the Cheetahmen ever were.”

            “…why?” Utsura croaked. “If you’re this powerful, why did you care so much about one little girl?”

            “Oh? Is this supposed to be the part where I answer all your little questions so you can go to whatever’s next for you, at least knowing why you died?” the Morbis mutant chuckled. “I suppose we have reached that stage in the game.” He swung Utsura by the legs like a baseball bat and knocked him against a tree trunk. “Because a Bugster like myself needs someone to die to make them complete, isn’t that the case? But that isn’t enough for one whose scope is as wide as mine, the grand villain of not just one game, but fifty-two!”

            He slammed Utsura against the ground next, then pinned the Rider under his huge simian foot. “To make all that real, we need the power of a child’s wonder. Awe or fear, it’s recognizing the greatness of something that we never had.”

            “ _That’s_ what you need?!”

            “Go ahead and laugh!” Doctor Morbis snarled. “But what makes a game a classic?! Becoming a beloved favorite of children, and when they grow up they’ll look back on that simple game as a reminder of when things were carefree and anything was possible! Don’t you dare try to deny how powerful that can be!”

            “I wouldn’t really know,” Kensei admitted. “I didn’t play video games as a kid.”

            Doctor Morbis laughed a long, angry laugh and pushed harder on Utsura with his foot “You’re an idiot if you think that only applies to video games!”

            “And I’m not the only one, if you think only the final boss gets form changes…” Utsura wheezed.

            “What?”

            “ **UNLEASH YOUR MIND. MAKE THE MASTERPIECE! COVER THE WOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRLLD!** **MIGHTY SKEEEEEEEETCH!!!** ” yelled Utsura’s Gamer Driver, the cry muffled from being pinned by a giant foot. But even so the title screen of Mighty wielding a paint brush and wearing a beret formed overhead and the familiar orange shape of the Sketch Gamer floated out. It squirted a high-pressure stream of paint into Morbis’ eyes and knocked him off-balance long enough for it to separate and attach itself on top of Utsura’s armor.

            He aimed one dragon-gauntlet above his head and its eyes glowed before shot a projectile out through the spray nozzle attached to the end. It arched through the air and glowed as it came down then splattered on Morbis’ face in a burst of colors. He screamed and clawed at his face, trying to brush away the burning paint. While he was distracted Utsura charged in and raked the knife-like bristles of the brush on his other arm across Morbis, leaving a trail of dragon fire where it passed.

            Morbis bellowed with animal fury and swung his fist at Utsura. Metal tentacles slithered out of the Rider’s backpack and pushed him up, out of the way and then whipped forward and latched onto Morbis’ shoulders. The tentacles retracted, yanking Utsura right up to the mutant’s still-colorful face, and getting him close enough to slash Morbis across the head with his fiery brush-arm over and over. After several vicious strikes Utsura pushed himself off Morbis’ chest with his feet and flipped backwards.

            Before he touched the ground Utsura had readied a finisher. “ **Dragon Sketch Critical Finish!!!** ” it roared as the metal tentacles slipped out tipped with hose and cannon nozzles. Streams of paint and fireballs in the shape of dragon heads bombarded Morbis until he fell back.

            Morbis didn’t move, the only sound in the forest was a soft simmering from the heat of Utsura’s ferocious attack. He slumped against a tree to catch his breath, his armor suddenly seeming to weigh a ton. Was it finally over?

Then suddenly the mutant scientist sat back up, tweaking a button on the Bugvisor he wore. The ape-rhino form dissolved away leaving the human Doctor Morbis for a second, then it was replaced by a humanoid cheetah wearing a white shirt and pants, with blue armor covering his arms and legs with bright white boots and gloves. In one hand he held a long wooden club and the other one held a crossbow.

            The club-wielding arm extended out and smacked into Utsura’s helmet. It swung back and forth battering him like a bullwhip. The dazed Rider staggered around until one last blow knocked him off the ground. He crashed through a barrier and the entire forest shattered away, leaving them all in Doctor Morbis’ office. Utsura’s armor dissolved completely as he hit the ground and Kiiko ran to his side, staring down in horror.

            “Perri, I’ve had enough of your games,” Morbis said.

            She screamed as he reached out and grabbed her with one extending arm.

 

XXX

 

            The room dissolved again and was replaced by another location: a huge grey ziggurat sprawled out underneath them as lightning flashed out across the sky, the ground surrounding it nothing but lifeless brown dirt. As Kiiko and Morbis looked out over the ground, a hideous multicolored mob walked out of the darkness on the horizon until they covered all the ground around the bottom.

            Eskimos, huge bugs, pandas, ghosts, a spider the size of a car, and a green toad almost as big wearing sunglasses and a black fedora. A walking hammer and set of vice grips. Ninja warriors in different brightly-colored uniforms. A giant upright hairbrush next to a smiling pink rabbit. A knight riding a dragon hovered in the air above the mass of game enemies, and of course the air was buzzing with ugly mismatched spaceships.

            They were enemies from all the games on the cartridge, there to see the ultimate victory of the greatest among them.

            Perri was kicking and screaming uselessly in Morbis’ superhuman grip. He retracted the arm and she started pounding on his furry chest with her fists but he ignored her completely and dropped her on an altar fitted with cuffs. “Fasten her in, Cygore,” Morbis ordered. “I’m sure you can handle such a daunting task.” Grumbling to himself, Cygore smacked Perri hard in to the stomach with his robot arm to show he wasn’t messing around, then restrained her wrists and ankles.

            As the nightmare legion watched Morbis from below, Kiiko shook Kensei’s shoulders trying to get him to react before it was too late. Morbis walked to the edge of the top platform they were on and let his mutant form dissolve away. “My people!” he yelled as he held up his arms, his voice carrying over the entire plain. “Tonight the long wait ends, and we become the legend that was always our right!”

“You have to get up, Kensei! If you don’t get up we’ll never be able to beat them!” Kiiko whispered. At that point she wasn’t even sure if it would make any difference or not.

            Her heart almost stopped as he braced himself with his hands, rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. She couldn’t say anything as he sat up, went over to Cygore and punched the villain’s assistant on the jaw. Something was already happening to Perri as he got to her side, though: her shape was turning hazy and small block-shaped bits of her were draining away through the cuffs and into the altar.

            “Kensei, take it!” Perri breathed.

            “Take what?!” he asked as he tried to pry one of the cuffs open. But the metal wouldn’t even budge.

            “The game!” Perri gasped, her back arching suddenly from pain. Kensei looked at her in confusion, but then saw a shape become more distinct through her chest. A Rider Gashat, but with the front half of a wheel sticking out of the top case. “It’s Kuro-san’s last one…you have to use it to stop Morbis!”

            “Ah, Perri,” Morbis himself interrupted. “This is the thanks I get for saving you, giving you a grand purpose besides sitting in that hole in the sky. You’d still be sleeping forever with all the other idiots if not for me and my friends.” The sarcastic smirk on his bearded face showed he didn’t care despite his words.

            The girl was already almost totally transparent by then. His hand shaking, Kensei reached in and pulled the silver Gashat out of her body. As he did Perri’s body disappeared completely. At the same time the Action 52 Gashat in Doctor Morbis’ hand quivered and literally glowed with energy. He held it up, grinning. “It’s complete! It’s FINALLY complete!!!”

            “You killed a little girl for that,” Kensei said, his voice low with a mixture of disbelief and digust.

            “Is that my fault, or the person who wrote me?” Morbis countered. “And I see you have one more toy I need to break. Go ahead, little Rider. Fire it up. Let me show you and all my friends down there what the full fury of 52 can do.”

            Kensei looked at the new Gashat in his hand: GENM MASTER SMASH, with the leabel showing shadowy shapes standing together with weapons drawn. The wheel sticking halfway out from the front showing mascots from famous GENM games, and he got an idea of what this one did.

            Doctor Morbis hit the trigger on his own Gashat. “ **YEAH! WHOO! YEAH! WHOO! YEAH! WHOO! Make your selection _now_ ,**” it now announced. He slid it into his Bugvsior and started to flicker.

            Already Kensei was hitting the trigger on the new Gashat in his hand. “ **JUMP! SHOOT! SLASH! SMASH! IT’S THE ULTIMATE TOURNAMENT! WHO WILL BE THE GENM MASTER ???** ” He slammed it into the loading space on his Gamer Driver. His black and yellow undersuit raced out to cover him, then a title screen formed in the sky, showing Mighty, the Brave Man from Taddle Quest, the faceless soldier from Bang Bang shooting, the masked samurai from Giri Giri Chambara, all facing each other ready to fight.

            Then a shiny silver Gamer robot floated out and split itself into pieces that locked onto Utsura’s body. Boxy gauntlets formed over his forearms with a black triangle on the back, a chestplate with a black oblong screen covering the front and bronze G’s on the shoulders, an oversize image of his mask across the back. Silver armor covered his legs up to the knee, with a bronze-colored G forming over the top. A long silver muffler unfolded from his armor, fastened around the neck.

            A rush of energy passed through his body and only a few seconds later it felt like he hadn’t been fighting at all that day, like he’d reached a level there was no number for. There was no description he knew for this much power.

            “A scarf? Seriously?” Morbis asked.

            “If you’re gonna go retro, go all the way,” Utsura replied.

            “The only place you’re going is HELL, little Rider,” Morbis said and was surrounded by a black tornado before changing back into the Cheetahman form he’d used before, and immediately stretched out his arm to try and hit Utsura with his club. As if he could see it coming for days, Utsura raised his arm and knocked Morbis’ incoming fist away from him. A second later there was a shockwave that knocked Kiiko and Cygore rolling away and sending long splintering cracks racing down the steps on both sides of the ziggurat.

            Morbis only stared for a second, his borrowed feline eyes shining with uncertainty. Suddenly he threw an extending kick. Utsura turned the wheel on his Gashat so the arrow on the case lined up with a picture of the masked samurai from Giri Giri Chambara. “ **Giri Giri no Chan Chan Bara Bara!** ” The words had barely stopped before suddenly he was holding a short yellow and pink scythe in each hand, a winged golden mask appearing over his goggles and his armor turned black. He hooked the ankle of Morbis’ extended foot with one, yanking it up and away from him then hacked through the blue armor. It snapped back again, leaving a cheetah’s foot exposed.

            The mutated scientist threw out both of his fists at the same time, both clutching one of Aries’ long wooden club. Before they hit swung his weapons in different directions and cut through them just like he had before. As they snapped back Utsura spun the wheel on the Gashat to the soldier from Bang Bang Shooting.

“ **Ba-Ba-Bang! Bang-Ba-Bang!** ” His weapons disappeared but another one took its place, a dark blue gun with a white grip, and green and orange buttons on the side. The golden mask disappeared and another helmet appeared on him, a shiny blue one with a long lock of lime green hair covering one eye that matched the color his muffler had turned. Tiger stripes of the same bright color formed on his new form’s silver armor as it turned blue.

            While Morbis was still recovering he pushed the gun’s green button and the barrel snapped out turning his weapon into a rifle. Then he pulled the trigger. A massive energy bullet ripped out of the muzzle and hit Morbis in the chest then carried him right off the top of the ziggurat. Utsura charged and jumped off after him, spinning the wheel to another image. “ **Bakusou Dokusou Gekisou Bousou Bakusou Bike!** ” it yelled as a sleek yellow motorcycle with cartoon eyes on the front appeared in the air for him to land on and ride to the ground. As soon as he touched it his helmet disappeared and a row of purple spikes formed down the back of Utsura’s head instead.

            The masses of game enemies on the ground looked up in confusion. Just a minute ago they’d been watching their leader declaring their victory, and now he was suddenly overwhelmed. They were so shocked Morbis crashed into a group of ninja and knocked them all down while Utsura’s bike came down right on top of four demonic clowns, flattening them all.

            He rode around in a wide circle, kicking away and running down any enemies not fast enough to get out of his way. Within a minute he’d managed to clear an empty space around himself and Morbis. Suddenly the Doctor’s form dissolved again and reformed into a hulking Cheetahman with the Ape-Man’s giant brown arms and wielding a power drill in his hands. He jabbed the drill out and tore Utsura’s motorcycle to shreds.

            The Rider managed to jump to safety just in time, landing in a crouch and his hand on the wheel of the Gashat. “You’ve had your fun!” Morbis roared. “Now you DIE!” He charged straight at Utsura, who tweaked the wheel to a space showing two Mightys, one blue and one orange, and shimmered as he changed again. “ **Mighty! Brothers! Futari de Hitori! Mighty! Brothers! Futari de Victory! X!!** ” Suddenly Utsura wasn’t where he’d been standing and Morbis yelped in surprise as he charged through an empty space between two Kamen Riders, a blue-armored one with an orange muffler and an orange-armored one with a blue muffler.

            “Attack!!!” Morbis screamed, and his mishmash of an army looked on uncertainly. “Attack!” he repeated. “All of you! He’s what’s standing between you and living forever!”

That was all they needed to hear as they closed in on Utsura like a screaming wall. Both Riders swung out identical weapons: they had a sword-like blade and a pad of colorful buttons built into the hilt. Both tapped a yellow button that said GUN and held out their weapons like rifles and blazed away in a double-helix sharped. As Blue Utsura swept his fire upward Orange Utsura swept his down, and they turned in a circle as they shot, carving through monster on the ground and ships, bats and dragons in the sky.

            A storm of shiny blocks spilled onto the ground as more and more of Morbis’ army were cut down by Utsura’s double-onslaught. Morbis looked back in disbelief as his followers retreated in the face of such a display of power, then both Utsuras pushed the orange button that said AXE and a wide orange blade of energy formed in front of their weapons. Both jumped and cleaved into him with their weapons, the force blasting him all the way across the field and hitting the ziggurat hard enough crack open the front wall.

            Shaking and covered in dust from the awesome attack he’d just suffered, Morbis choked, “You think your company’s games are so much better??”

            “This isn’t the power of games,” Blue Utsura said.

            “This is the power of heroes!” Orange Utsura affirmed. “The power of the heroes who saved the world before us!”

            “Then see all of MINE!” Morbis screamed in rage. His mutant form dissolved away again, another black tornado formed around him. The two Utsuras stopped in horror as it swelled up, growing even bigger than the Ape-Man had been. The tornado cleared revealing a towering Cheetahman, arms ripping with power, eyes shining black with demonic red pupils. There even seemed to be small dark horns sticking out from between his ears. But the Riders’ attention was elsewhere, because then held up a gleaming knife in each hand as tall as a full-grown man.

            But again the Utsuras adjusted the wheel on their Gashats. “ **The Strongest Fist! Round 1! Fire and Lightning!** ” said Orange Utsura’s Driver as he changed again. His armor turned dark red with a flame pattern on the back of his gauntlets, then flames formed in the oblong display on his chest and down the length of his muffler too. Stiff, spiky anime hair formed on his head. The front of his gauntlets molded itself forward to cover his hands in heavy metal guards.

            Blue Utsura switched to another game’s mode too. “ **Pursue Wander RPG!** ” yelled his gear. His armor turned a sinister indigo with blue highlights, a long black cape unfurling from his shoulders and a pair of demonic blue eyes appearing in his oblong chest display. A horned indigo mask was the final touch.

            Then Morbis charged, bellowing like an angry animal and swinging his blades. Red Utsura ran straight at him and threw a punch that connected with the side of one of Morbis’ weapons. Sparks flew as they pushed against each other, and then, incredibly, the giant knife went spinning away. Red Utsura jumped and delivered an uppercut to his enemy’s chin, knocking him back on his butt.

            Meanwhile Indigo Utsura turned around to where the army of game enemies were starting to inch toward him to help their leader again. He lifted the edge of his cape and then turned, swinging it wide and sending out a cloud of billowing black and purple smoke. The cloud washed over Morbis’ army. After a few seconds a red color formed in the eyes of the different monster and warriors, in the windscreens of the vehicles and spacecraft. Then they followed as Indigo Utsura flew across the field.

 

XXX

 

            In the chamber that Morbis had been knocked through, the lights flickered a few times then went out. The clinical white surroundings slowly came into focus in Doku Dasao’s eyes, and he carefully climbed out of the cracked glass tube where he’d been confined.

            “Dasao? Is that you?” Yoshoku mumbled as he climbed out of the tube he’d been in. “What the hell’s going on?”

            “I…,” Doku started to say, then stopped himself. “It looks like our side’s winning.”

            “Is that Hidenaga?” Yoshoku asked, peering outside the ziggurat to where Red Utsura easily traded blows with the mutated Doctor Morbis while Indigo Utsura ran in front of a screaming army of video game monsters.

            Doku shrugged and sighed in exhaustion. “It would figure, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

 

XXX

 

            Morbis brought down his remaining blade, narrowly missing Red Utsura who slammed his armored fist down on Morbis’ wrist and kicked his last weapon away.

            “You’re out of luck, Rider,” Morbis growled. “Looks like they found their nerve after all!”

            “Am I?” Red Utsura asked, then jumped back. The writhing wall of enemies surged around him and smashed into Morbis himself like a tidal wave. Ships blasted, monsters tore at him and those with weapons hacked and shot with them. The mutated mastermind barely had a chance to let out a strangled cry of his surprise before he was brought down beneath the unending wave of his former followers.

            “It’s time to finish this,” both Kamen Rider Utsuras said together, and primed their finishing attack.

            “ **MASTER CRITICAL STRIKE!** ” said. Both Riders merged into one again, this time his armor a bright red with an oversized robotic fist on the left arm and a golden V crest on his forehead. He leaned back and it fired off like a rocket, annihilating a path through the game enemies and hitting Morbis hard enough to knock him fifty feet across the ground.

            His armor changed again, a dark yellow with a ballcap over his head, speakers on his chest and shoulders and a small record turntable on his arm. He pulled the disc on his arm backwards and a storm of musical notes came from the array of speakers. They landed all over the battlefield and exploded, taking out a circle of enemies ten feet wide everywhere they hit.

            Then his armor turned turquoise. A knight’s plume unfolded off the top of his head, with a small shield on his arm and a sword with a blue blade in his hand. He swung the weapon and a sheet of ice formed over the attacking enemies and over Morbis himself, freezing them all solid.

            Finally his armor turned pink, with three spiky crests forming over his forehead and a white hammer appearing in his hand, the Gashacon Breaker. Huge staring eyes formed in the oblong screen. The power of GENM’s flagship title, Mighty Action X itself, had filled him.

Utsura crouched and then jumped high. Higher than he’d ever jumped, even with his powers. Morbis’ eyes tracked him all the way up, then Utsura came down again with the head of his hammer aimed at the villain’s own head. Blazing energy surrounded it as Utsura picked up speed.

With a cry of desperation Morbis flexed his muscles and shattered the ice around him. He started to turn to retreat, but suddenly he stopped, growling in confusion. Three transparent figures appeared, grabbing onto his arms and legs to hold him in place.

Aries, Apollo, and Hercules.

The Cheetahmen.

Utsura’s hammer hit Morbis right between his feral eyes. A huge pixelated explosion ripped out and covered them all. It billowed out farther and farther for almost a minute, covering most of the battlefield. It finally dispersed, leaving only Utsura standing with the Gashacon Breaker leaned against his shoulder and a familiar GAME CLEAR graphic above him.

“Kensei-kun!” Kiiko called out as she ran down the broken steps of the ziggurat. Cygore was stumbling down them after her, but clusters of pixels were falling off him as he did. He just stopped halfway down and waited, what looked a lot like a smile of relief on his face as he totally disappeared.

“Where did you get that game, Hidenaga?” Yoshoku demanded as he and Doku stepped out of the chamber. “I swear if you stole that one on purpose too…”

“Can I please tell you guys this story later?” Utsura panted. He reached down to unload the Gashat but it tingled painfully in his fingers even through his suit. The wheel started to shine a hologram of Kuroto Dan in front of them, smiling and arms folded proudly.

“This ends the demo portion of this game! Thank you for your cooperation with the game master! It will be remembered.” Then it disappeared and Utsura’s suit flickered away with it.

Kensei sighed and sat down in the dirt. A whole formed in the dark sky overhead, the orange of an early summer evening, and got wider with the Game Area around them slowly breaking down.

“So we won, huh?” Yoshoku asked nobody in particular.

“One of us did,” Doku muttered.

“All the two of you did was make things harder,” Kiiko interrupted, scowling. “The doctor was using your powers back there to fight Kensei!”

Kensei waved his gently hand to cut her off. “We won, Kiiko. That’s enough.”

And then, surprising him slightly, no-one else said anything else. They sat down next to him and just watched as the real city came back bit by bit, a beautiful sunset shining over the tops of the buildings that were reappearing.

The wind picked up, tossing Kiiko’s hair into Kensei’s face. As he was pulling it away he though he heard someone whispering, “Thank you…”

“For what?” Yoshoku asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” Kensei answered.

“No, but I did,” the same voice said with a giggle.

As their surroundings faded, four shapes came into focus in front of them. The first one they could make out was Perri, then the three Cheetahmen. “Thank you…all of you,” Perri said. “For coming to help me when I needed you. I remember more now...”

“What do you remember, Perri?” Kensei asked, holding out his hand for her. She put her palm in his even though it slipped through.

“I remember Yuuma Hidenaga now,” she said. “He was trying to save me when he…when he lost. He was brave, but I think you’re even braver. All of you,” she said, smiling at the Riders and then up at the Cheetahmen too. “Thank you. I wasn’t sure I’d meet one person who’d risk their life to help meet, but I met so many…thank you…” she one last time, then she and the Cheetahmen turned into streams of pixels and floated away to a faint point of light in the sky.

            None noticed a miniature pirate ship with a blue Kamen Rider at the wheel turn and drift away on the wind.

 

XXX

 

            In spite of all the chaos that had been gripping the city, the depths of Machina Vision’s headquarters were buzzing with activity as always. In operations rooms people with clipboards were staring at monitors showing Utsura’s battle with Morbis. They had on protective goggles, since they’d been watching the footage over and over for ten hours straight by then, looking for any detail the company could play to its advantage.

            The levels below ground were no different, technicians rushing from computer bank to computer bank checking monitors for any shred of data their boss could utilize to increase their power.

            Ayatsu Shuugouteki himself walked through all the chaos, seeming oblivious to the people responsible for his organization’s power base. A man in a black suit, with shoulders so broad he almost brushed against the computer banks on both sides, followed close behind him not saying a word. The only thing that got Ayatsu’s attention was a tech running up to him yelling, “Shuggouteki-sama! We have an analysis on those things reshaping the area! It’s like the technology the Kamen Riders already use, but it’s so much more powerful—”

            He waved his hand. “Spare me the documentary. Can the effect be replicated?”

            “Yes sir,” the tech nodded. “We believe it can. There should be a viable prototype completed for testing within ninety-two hours.”

            Ayatsu waved his hand again. “Next week will be fine. We’ll be needing Suihei’s next round of upgrades implemented right away.”

            “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” the tech replied, then hurried away to get started.

            “Thank you, Doctor Morbis,” Ayatsu smiled as he continued his inspection tour. The battlefield was going to be changing soon.

 

XXX

 

**And there it finally is, the “movie”! Man, this got away from me. Still and all, that was a cool last fight to write.**

**You probably figured it out on your own from the henshin jingle if nothing else, but the idea for Utsura’s super mode for this “movie” was based on the Smash Bros. series, being an insane multiplayer fighting tournament between every character in the company’s line-up.**

**Attentive readers might read the description of Doctor Morbis’ Bugvisor and complain the buttons on it are backwards. That was intentional: in Action 52 the input from the A & B buttons is backwards from what it is on practically every other game on the NES. Another sign of the care and attention that went into the worst game ever made.**

**There are a few things that’ll be coming back to the main story from this. Hope you’ll join me then.**


End file.
